This is a Nepali lesson in national pride and confidence that New Delhi’s new ‘Empire Builders’ will remember for a long time. Some Pakistani ‘defeatists’, especially in our media, can also learn a lesson or two from the Nepalese.

Kathmandu, Nepal—Think what, you pay for their visit at your place; make their stay comfortable when they are there; let them learn as much as they can from the experiences you have achieved so far, but in turn they criticize you for what you have accomplished. What an unjust world this is?

At an interaction program sponsored by the High Offices of the Indian embassy in Kathmandu---moderated by none less than a journalist of the stature of Ameet Dhakal-a modest person, working at the Kathmandu Post, this is exactly what happened.

The Indian embassy in Kathmandu had organized a post-visit interaction program at the Malla Hotel, to let the fourteen member delegation of the Nepali Civil Servants- who have recently arrived home after two weeks “study visit to India on Indian Federalism”, interact with the Nepali Intellectuals and the media men as well.

The Indian Ambassador to Nepal, Mr. Rakesh Sood delivering his speech prior to the interaction program hoped that “the venue would give the Nepali intellectuals a good platform to discuss and learn from the success of India’s federal democracy”.

But to the dismay of the host and many others including this pen pusher, the interaction program turned out to be a platform to criticize Indian federalism and not to forget, pass their judgment on what they termed “the messy Indian bureaucracy, corrupt judiciary and faltering economy”. Was this the real state of world’s largest federal democracy! C’est pas possible!The Katmandu Post Editor, Ameet Dhakal who had earlier mentioned that he had just forty minutes to discuss the issue yet it was enough for the Civil servants to criticize the inner flaws in which India’s federal democracy is said to be “thriving”.

State of Inclusion in the bureaucracy

“No need to worry for the Nepalese”, said the secretary at the PM’s office, Ms. Binda Hada Bhattarai a member of the Nepali delegation adding: “there is less than nine percent women representation in the Indian bureaucracy and that women in the parliament are physically assaulted by the police when they ask for equal treatment from the State---this is the state of inclusion in the world’s largest federal democracy”.

“We, the Nepalese, are not that far behind … at this speed we will lead from the front very soon.” Ms. Binda was certainly cutting a joke at the state of affairs in India while responding to a question posed by Dr. Sayed Mohammad Habibullah, former head of the Political Science Department, TU.“India cannot be taken as a federal State, not a quasi federal State and at worse not even they have a functioning cooperative federal structure…we are utterly confused”, said another member of the delegation.

Indian Judiciary

“The judiciary is not that different in India either…Supreme Court only has 25 Judges however, to our Himalayan surprise they had more than fifty judges at the Delhi High Court...the Delhi high court gave us the impression that it was no different than a Fish Market---all gave a messy look that it was,” he continued.

Federal System“They have three tiers of division in their State Structure: the federal government, the state government and the government at the lowest level---which was made practically powerless when Late Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India---making a constitutional amendment he made them toothless,…if we prefer to take on the three layer system for the division in the State Structure, better we choose the Swiss model-empowering the grass root, but not India”, they added. More so, the highest participation of women is at the lowest level in India making it more than 48 per cent but unfortunately they have been rendered powerless”. What a shame?

“Currently, India is divided into 29 states with more than 10 million population per State- they have become unmanageable so far…they must double the number of States”, the leader of the delegation Dr. Ram Hari Aryal- Secretary at the Ministry of General Administration suggested adding, “while meeting the experts of federalism in India this was the general impression we could collect.”.

Mr. Aryal giving reference to a meeting with Dev Mukherjee-India’s former ambassador to India said, “Mr. Mukherjee was of the opinion that dividing the country into various states was indeed a difficult task, we need to be careful on several matters; most important is the equal division of natural resources. Mukherjee suggested that the country should be divided vertically- from North to South which could prove to be a fruitful one for Nepal”.

To make it simpler, Ambassador Mukherjee was perhaps of the opinion that the notion of One Madhesh One Province could bode ill for Nepal. However, there were some Madhesi intellectuals at the program, who immediately ridiculed Mukherjee’s thoughts and threatened that “if the notion of one Madhesh one province was not accepted, Nepal could see a vertical split”. Ooh la la! Professor Birendra Pandey-TU was the one to criticize Mukherjee.

Now it was the turn to criticize the:

India economy

Referring to an Indian economist the delegation Head Mr. Aryal said that there was a big economic disparity in India, there are some states that are very rich such as Maharastra and Goa-mainly because of remittance but not through tourism--which is normally projected; there are very poor states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India…India’s two third population is living under the poverty line though the country claims nine percent of grown rate per annum”. Intriguing phenomenon indeed!

Food For thought“We know a lot about India and its so-called Federal Democracy…we do not need to know more from them”, said an intellectual who was sitting by the side of this scribe.

Note: The study visit was sponsored by the Govt. of India as requested by Govt. of Nepal under the Nepal-India Economic Program.

This article was originally published on June 10, 2008, under the title Dissecting India’s Federal Democracy, carried by The Telegraph weekly in Nepal. This article has been slightly edited for clarity.

INFORMATION PRESS - News Views Media - www.InformPress.com- Chief Editor - Journalist SYED ADEEB - www.SyedAdeeb.net- InformPress.com Newsletter - Saturday, 27 December 2008 - USA US-NATO-ISAF Must Punish All Hindu Terrorists Who Killed Christians By Chad Hazlett (InformPress.com) - The terror attacks on Mumbai made headlines aroundthe world. When the dust settled, we found ourselves asking the samequestions: "How did this happen?" and "What could we have done toprevent this?" But while India and the world contemplates the causesand consequences of these attacks, we ignore India's Hindu Terrorism:From late August through October 2008, organized Hindu extremistgroups committed systematic attacks killing more than 100 people,mostly Christians, in the eastern India state of Orissa. Mostworrying, the Hindu terrorists responsible for Orissa's violenceremain at-large and have explicitly threatened to repeat their attacksafter December 25, 2008. Three Hindu extremist groups - the RSS, VHP, and the Bajrang Dal - areresponsible for this autumn's violence, destroying some 4500 homes andburning 147 churches in India. The dead are mostly Christians and somemoderate Hindus. Father Akbar Digal, a Christian, was beheaded afterthree times refusing to convert to Hinduism. Gayadhar Digal, a Hindu,was hacked to death, and his wife and son nearly killed for appearingsympathetic to Christianity. Others have been burned alive and beaten,then buried alive. Some 40,000-60,000 sought refuge in the forestswhere they were further hunted. Hundreds remain missing. Over 11,000remain displaced and the attackers have threatened to kill them uponreturning if they do not convert to Hinduism. The attacks have been alarmingly systematic. Repeating tactics used bythese Hindu terror groups in similar attacks last year, the Augustattacks began with cutting down trees to block the roads and cuttingphone lines to block communications. Mobs led by these Hindu extremistgroups were armed with guns and machetes, shouting slogans such as"Christians must become Hindu or die. Kill Them. Kill Them. KillThem." The same Hindu terror groups have organized related attacksacross the country, the best known being in Gujarat, India, in 2002where about 2000 to 5000 Indian-Muslims were killed. In each of these cases, violence continued for weeks withoutintervention by the state and the Hindu perpetrators have enjoyedimpunity thereafter. Six years after the Gujarat killings, there hasbeen only one conviction. There were no convictions after the December2007 violence. Without any punishment, we can expect these Hinduextremist groups to continue terrorizing civilians as a tactic toimpose their will on the state and drive out minority religiouscommunities. In fact, threats of renewed violence in the coming weeks are so clearthat if we ignore them and violence escalates, nobody can say we"didn't know." The Hindu extremists remain at-large and have demandedthat the Orissa Government pass several laws to further suppressChristianity. Failure to impose these laws, they threaten, will resultin more violence through a ban on all public activity after Dec. 25 -enforced by club-toting members of these Hindu terror groups -effectively prohibiting Christian festivities. Responsibility for preventing further violence lies with the IndianGovernment. The attacks in Mumbai have shown that when terroristsstrike at Westerners and expensive hotels, Indian security forces canreact and kill or arrest the terrorists within days. In Orissa, bycontrast, two months into the violence, victims of Hindu terrorismwere still being burned alive. Orissa's Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik, does not appear to be a Hindunationalist zealot. But he is politically beholden to Hindu extremistparties that use this violence to rally votes. At the national level,federal security forces finally came to stop the violence - after twomonths. However, [Indian-Sikh] Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has notbanned all Hindu terrorist parties responsible despite calls fromadvisers to do so, perhaps because doing so could be bad for politicsin this Spring's election. This element of Indian Government sympathyand political hedging make international condemnation all the moreimportant. The international community should do its part to ensurethat banning violent Hindu extremists and ending impunity for them isto India's political and economic advantage. However, if the West isto speak more loudly on this issue, it must do so in the name ofcounter-terrorism, religious freedom and the fundamental human rights,not because it is Christians who were attacked this time. The U.S. public response has been almost entirely the result ofmobilization by Christian groups with close ties to churches inOrissa. But the public coalition that can and should unite behind thisis much larger. Darfur's atrocities provoked an unprecedented Americanconstituency for stopping genocide. While this constituency continuespressing for peace and protection in Darfur, situations like Orissathat are more tractable and still in their formative stages offer anopportunity to achieve the most important goal of fighting genocideand atrocity: prevention. This issue must not be swept aside in the aftermath of Mumbai'sattacks, but raised as an important part of India's role in fightingterrorism within its borders. The U.S. Government should considernaming the individuals responsible for leading these Hindu extremistgroups as Hindu terrorists by adding them to the U.S. TreasuryDepartment's list of "Specially Designated Nationals" (SDN). The U.S.Government should add all Hindu terrorist organizations to the U.S.State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). Itshould also begin investigating Hindu-American charitableorganizations that appear to be providing funding for these Hinduterror groups and ask that India investigate Hindu terror financing ontheir side in parallel. [Read: SFH: http://www.stopfundinghate.org ] U.S. President George W. Bush and U.S. President-elect Barack Obamashould end their silence on India's Hindu terrorism. Every U.S.Government official, whether in the U.S. Congress or theAdministration, should raise Orissa in the course of his/her otherdealings with Indian officials and ask what their plan is for endingimpunity for domestic Hindu terrorism. How will they investigate andpunish all those Hindus who plan and lead these terrorist attacks? Howwill the state and federal governments in India ensure that next timeit does not take two months to stop the killing? It is not too late tohead off mass killing of Christians by Hindu terrorists in Orissaafter this Christmas and to prevent it [the genocide of Christians,Muslims, Kashmiris, Bengalis, Sikhs, Dalits and other nations]elsewhere in India where it is sure to recur if Hindu terrorism againgoes unpunished. Hindu Extremists' Reward to Kill Christians, as Britain Refuses to BarMembers http://www.fiacona.o...i...&newsid=705 [Mr. Chad Hazlett is Protection Director of the Genocide InterventionNetwork (GIN) based in Washington DC, USA. He has lived and worked inIndia. http://www.genocideintervention.net ] India Uncovers Hindu Terror Group that Carried Out Bombings Blamed onIslamists At least 10 people, including Indian-Hindu monk, Sadhvi Pragya SinghThakur, and India Army officer, Indian-Hindu Lt. Colonel ShrikantPrasad Purohit, held By Andrew Buncombe New Delhi, India, 23 November 2008 (BelfastTelegraph.co.uk) - India isin something of a state of shock after learning from official sourcesthat its first Hindu terror cell may have carried out a series ofdeadly bombings that were initially blamed on "militant Muslims." Therevelation is forcing the country to consider some difficultquestions. At least 10 people have been arrested in connection with several bombblasts in the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon in the western stateof Maharashtra [India] in September [2008], which left six peopledead. But reports suggest that [Indian] police believe the [Hinduterror] cell may also have carried out a number of previous attacks,including last year's notorious bombing of a cross-border train enroute to Pakistan, which killed 68 people. Among the alleged membersof the cell are a serving [India] Army officer [Hindu Lt. ColonelShrikant Prasad Purohit] and a Hindu monk [Sadhvi Pragya SinghThakur]. Bomb attacks are not uncommon in India - there has been a flurry inrecent months - but [Indian-Hindu] police usually blame them on"Muslim extremists," often said to have links to militant groups basedin either Pakistan or Bangladesh. As a result, the recent cracking ofthe alleged Hindu cell has forced India to face some difficult issues.A country that prides itself on purported religious and culturaltoleration - an ambition that in reality often falls short - has beenmade to ask itself how this cell could operate for so long. India'smilitary, which prides itself on its professionalism, has been forcedto order an embarrassing inquiry. The near-daily drip of revelations from [Indian] police has alsocaused red faces for India's main political opposition, the Hindunationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ahead of state polls and ageneral election scheduled for early next year. The BJP and its primeministerial candidate, Lal Krishna Advani, have long accused the[Indian National] Congress [INC] party-led government of being soft onterrorism that involved Muslims. However, the BJP has refused to callfor a clampdown on Hindu groups, and last week Mr. Advani evencriticised the [Indian] police over the way they questioned one of thealleged [Hindu terror] cell members, a [Hindu] woman called SadhviPragya Singh Thakur. The [INC] Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, phoned his rival to ask himnot to politicise the issue or the investigation. "There is a strongcase so let the police do their job," he told Mr. Advani. While somecommentators have expressed surprise about the discovery of thealleged [Hindu terror] cell, others have pointed out that there hasbeen growing concern about the possible threat from Hindu extremists.In the summer, two members of a right-wing Hindu group were killedwhile putting together a bomb, and two other suspected members of thesame group died in similar circumstances in 2006. Meanwhile, senior right-wing leaders have made no secret of their wishthat Hindus should form suicide squads to protect themselves against"Muslim extremists." Bal Thackeray, leader of a group called the ShivSena, which has been responsible for communal and regional violence inMumbai, wrote recently in the party's magazine: "The threat of Islamicterror in India is rising. It is time to counter the same with Hinduterror. Hindu suicide squads should be readied to ensure the existenceof Hindu society and to protect the nation." Observers say the fact that the [Indian] police have arrested thealleged [Hindu terror] cell members amid considerable politicalpressure suggests the growing professionalism of its security forces."It's the first Hindu cell and it's the first time Hindus have beenshackled and taken to jail," said Professor Dipankar Gupta, asociologist at Delhi's Jawarlahal Nehru University. "I am quitepleased with the way the police have done their jobs." Internet-Web Links: (1) DW: http://www.dictatorshipwatch.com (2) Sooper Media: http://soopermedia.wordpress.com (3) Hindu Terrorism Against Christians, Muslims, Kashmiris, Bengalis,Sikhs, Dalits and Other Nations in the Terrorist Mafia State of Indiaand Hindu-Occupied Kashmir: http://www.state.gov...2008/108500.htm -- http://www.indianchristians.in -- http://www.persecution.in -- http://www.sabrang.com -- http://www.ucanews.c...olence-in-india -- HRW: http://www.hrw.org/en/asia/india -- AI: http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/india -- COK: http://www.khalistan.com -- DV: http://www.dalitvoice.org -- KMS: http://www.kmsnews.org -- JIH: http://www.jamaateislamihind.orghttp://www.ahrchk.ne...statements/1789 (4) Anti-Christian Attacks in India - Ban Bajrang Dal http://www.petitiono...7/petition.html Denounce the Massive Muders of Christians and Jews by Indian-HinduOrganizations http://www.petitiono...h/petition.html (5) InformPress.com 2 Web-EMail Newsletters: -- http://groups.google...p/reportpress--http://groups.yahoo....oup/informpress INFORMATION PRESS - News Views Media - www.InformPress.com - USA

Referring to an Indian economist the delegation Head Mr. Aryal said that there was a big economic disparity in India, there are some states that are very rich such as Maharastra and Goa-mainly because of remittance but not through tourism--which is normally projected; there are very poor states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India … India’s 2/3rd population is living under the poverty line though the country claims 9% of grown rate per annum”. Intriguing phenomenon indeed!

...

2/3rd of 1.2 Billion is about 800 Million!

Some other reports claimed almost 900 Million (about 3 times the population of USA) is starving because they are consuming less than about 2,400 calories each day (less than 50 cents per day!)

Unfortunately, 85% of Indian Muslims are part of this group too. These Muslims in India are actually poorer than Shudras (or, Dravidians, Un-touchables, Scheduled Classes, etc)!

If this isn't Cast System in practice then what else is. The greatest evil in the World isn't terrorism but the Hindu Cast System! Hurdles against the upward mobility of most of the Lower Castes and Non Hindus keeps them starving!

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

"India is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator." -Winston Churchill

"We are a nation with our distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, name and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion. Legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitude and ambitions; in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life." -Quaid-e-Azam

"It is a matter of deep humiliation to confess that we are a house divided against itself, that we Hindus and Mussulmans are flying at one another. It is a matter of still deeper humiliation that we Hindus regard several million of our own kith and kin as too degraded even for our touch."

M.K. Gandhi`s address to the US through Columbia Broadcasting System in 1930s:

Such discrimination, as noted by Gandhi himself, forced many Dalits to convert to Islam, Budhism and Christianity, in the hope of gaining some social standing in the society that refuses to consider them human otherwise. But the VHP led Hindu right took this to be an unforgivable sin. To abandon their religion and that too for Islam outraged the hardliners to the core. The VHP saw this as a serious threat to its notion of Hinduism.

India, the world`s largest secular democracy is everything but that. This rhetoric sounds good but only for so long. It becomes nauseating when this hypocrisy takes such toll that humans are openly butchered in the streets while the government prides itself to be a representative of those very people.

Prologue

Indian history of the past sixty years has been marred by religious, political and communal violence. An interesting trend to note is that only certain religious issues become prominent in politics; causing agitation and leading to communal riots. This essay attempts to ascertain the sociological, psychological, economic, and political explanations for incidents of communal violence, in Gujarat, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Maharashtra, Orrissa and Delhi in India.

The first major riots that occurred in India between Hindus and Muslims after the bloodshed of partition in 1947, can be traced back to as long as 1961, in Jabalpur a central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. (sic) They were followed by riots in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh with periodic violence erupting elsewhere. Thousands of Sikhs were murdered in Delhi in 1984. The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the hands of two Sikh bodyguards triggered further violence; a response from Sikhs at the killing of innocent worshippers at the holy shrine when the Indian Army stormed into the temple with full force under her orders. But the roots of present day violence can be best traced to the 1980`s.

Hindu mob is beating a helpless Sikh during violence against Sikhs in Delhi in1980.

Sikhs burnt alive in the streets of Delhi. (1980)

Gujarat riots of 2002 were another horror story where thousands of Muslims were burnt alive, raped and slaughtered by Hindu fascists in the first genocide of 21st century. The recent anti-Christian violence in India is being viewed by the world with concern as it is a sign of how quickly such violence can spiral out of control.

The last thing the world wants is another incident similar to the Gujarat riots of 2002 or the destruction of Babri Masjid of 1992, which gave way to months of fierce unrest.

Following the demolition, some 2000 people were killed in communal riots in Ayodhya, Bombay and beyond. Hindu hardline parties, including the Vishwa Hindu Prashad (VHP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - used Ayodhya as a rallying call to Hindus throughout India. They said the 16th century mosque at the site was located on the birthplace of the Hindu Lord Rama and that a temple had to be built there. The temple till date has not come up but the memories of the destruction of the mosque still haunt the minorities in India.

Some blame the Muslim movement for an independent Pakistan as the source of division in India on the basis of religion. But religious intolerance has not remained confined to Muslims only. Other minorities including Christians and lower caste Hindus, otherwise known as dalits, have also borne the brunt of the fascist Hindu ideology that fuels this violence. The problem is much bigger than what is taken to be in explaining these disturbing tendencies. In all the mentioned incidents what remains consistent is the fact that the aggressors are always fundamentalist Hindus, who seek justification of their horrendous sins in divine rulings. Thus this mindset can be best made sense of with an understanding of Hinduism itself.

“Inequality is the soul of Hinduism,” wrote Ambedkar. He characterized the oppressive caste system as the tyranny of Hinduism. After spending a lifetime in a crusade against the oppressive Hinduism, Ambedkar finally renounced Hinduism, and converted to Buddhism and exhorted his followers to do the same. It is an irony that BJP and other Sangh Parivar outfits are trying to appropriate such a historic personality as Dr. BR Ambedkar.

Some claim that India was a country that preached non-violence ever since the Vedic period. This sounds ironic especially when today`s India has become a conundrum of violence with BJP-led Saffron Brigade trying to create a Hindu Rashtra.

This has resulted in terrible and outrageous violence against the minorities living in India, which in actuality define the secular credentials of India.

The new wave of attacks against Christians was triggered by the killing of a Hindu leader, Swami Laxanananda Saraswati, along with five other people at Tumudibandh, Kandhamal District, in Orissa on 23 August 2008.

The rebellious Maoist Naxalite groups prominent in this region have claimed responsibility for the murder of Swami and his followers. In addition, the state police authorities have stated that the killing was carried out by the Maoists. However, leaders of certain fundamentalist Hindu organizations like the Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini blamed Christians for these killings. Despite the condemnation expressed by Christian groups and churches at the killing of the Swami and his associates and their demand for the culprits to be caught and punished, in retaliation, the extremist Hindu organizations have engaged in a series of attacks against Christians throughout the Sate of Orissa.

The minority Christians in Orissa have been experiencing various forms of atrocities in recent weeks including looting, destruction of churches and church-run institutions, brutal attacks against priests, nuns, church workers and other members of the Christian community, most of whom are Dalits and Adivasis (tribals).

Reports from various sources confirmed that at least fifty thousand Christians in Orissa have been displaced; hundreds of Christians have fled their homes and taken refuge in forests; many others are living in as many as eighteen relief camps, which offer them only so much relief in the wake of the mayhem that has wrecked their lives.

The plight of the victims and survivors of this communal carnage, the fear and trauma they are experiencing, the poor and unhygienic facilities in the government-run relief camps, the inefficiency of government machinery in tackling the violence, continue to be a serious concern.

The upsurge of religious extremism in Orissa in recent weeks has left many Christians in Orissa virtually defenseless.

(House belonging to Christian family burnt to ashes. Thousands of houses of Christians were burnt by Fanatic Hindus during recent violence in Orissa and other states of India).

Insight into the communal violence in India

Though Hindutva ideologues often try and confuse matters by claiming that India is already a Hindu Rashtra, which translated in English means a "Hindu nation", they know that their model of Indian society, if it is to come about, requires the prior establishment of a Hindu state under Sangh control, which in coordination with the RSS, alone can dramatically re-shape the Indian society/polity demanded by a proper Hindu Rashtra. But there are only two routes to achieving such radicals strong state power — through an electorate to secure an absolute or near-absolute majority for the BJP in Parliament; or bypassing altogether the constitutional-electoral route and carrying out an authoritarian coup either of a military-police kind, or a civilian unconstitutional coup of the Emergency-type. Through this a dominant but minority party comes to power in a coalition through elections but then overthrows all democratic-electoral restraints and establishes its authoritarian state. Fascism in Germany and Italy combined t

he electoral and unconstitutional processes and attained central control in this manner.

Gujrat is being used as a rallying point by BJP, RSS, Bajrang Dal, Durga Vahini, Balidani Dasta of Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and Vishav Hindu Parishad. Taking it to be the starting point, they wish to take their malicious agenda forward to Orissa and beyond.

Organized violence against Christians in India

This new wave of organised violence against Christians, which started in Orissa, has now spread to other States such as Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala.

Attacks launched by Hindu extremist groups against the Christians are considered as an well thought-out plot and just one link in a long chain of events that have continued to strain communal harmony and inter-religious relations in the country. Although the attacks against Christians are interpreted as religious violence, in most circumstances the under current is based on socio-economic factors. Christians in the country have been repeatedly accused of encouraging conversion to Christianity. Various Churches have been unequivocal in their official documents and statements and have insisted that conversion to Christianity by force or fraudulent means is strictly prohibited.

(Cross at stakes: Many Churches destroyed in Orissa recently )

Churches being vandalized in Delhi

3. What the constitution of India says?

Contrary to what the Indian constitution states in terms of protecting minority rights, Hindu militant groups are trying to replicate the example of Bajrang Dal. The Bajrang Dal was set up in 1984 as the youth arm of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Mr Prakash Sharma was made its Kanpur unit convener. At that time, it was “active only in a few districts of Uttar Pradesh. Today it has some 13 lakh activists spread across most of the States and the aim is to cover every district of the country. The Bajrang Dal leader denied that his organisation was involved in the violence against Christians in Kandhamal district of Orissa or in Mangalore and elsewhere in Karnataka, although the Karnataka unit chief Mahendra Kumar, had issued a statement accepting its role. Mr. Sharma listed the tasks before the Dal as “seva” (service of the people) and “suraksha” (protection). Its volunteers were given tough physical training to help them protect themselves and the people. He insisted that they were not trained in firearms, and were trained only in “aiming with air guns for which we run regular camps.”

Mr Sharma very openly and nonchalantly admitted that the minorities can only live in a Hindu Rashtra if they stop preaching their religion. “We do not say do not go to mosques or churches. But conversion must be stopped. We have re-converted to Hinduism through the Ghar Vapasi (home-coming) programme about 10,000-15,000 people since I became Bajrang Dal convener in 2002.”

Here is another chilling reality that somehow is escaping the Government of India. The violence and threats against the Christians/minorities of India is an assault on the Constitution of India. The Indian Constitution declares India to be a “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic” which secures to all citizens “justice; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; and equality of status and opportunity”. Under articles 14, 15 and 16 of the Indian Constitution, discrimination based on religion is prohibited. Article 25 guarantees the right to freely practice and propagate religion. In addition to these constitutional guarantees at the domestic level, India is also party to several international treaties that stipulate human rights obligations. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights establishes the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Article 26 bar discrimination on the grounds of religion while Article 27 stipulates that in “those states in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion...”.

India now has seven states, which have legislation banning religious conversions. The seven Indian states with anti-conversion legislation (known as the Freedom of Religion Acts), include Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. Hindu extremists commonly use anti-conversion legislation to falsely accuse Christians of converting people through force or allurement; thus justifying subsequent attacks on Christians. They also deflect prosecution away from themselves by pressing charges of “forcible conversion” without any evidence.

The response of the church in India

Atrocities committed against Christians are horrendous and their unspeakable state is no less than a nightmare. In August 2008, a crowd of up to 4,000 Hindu militants attacked the Brethren in Christ Girls Hostel at Nuagoan, one of nine such facilities funded through the Scholarship Program for International Children’s Education (SPICE). The mob set the hostel and church ablaze, destroyed its water tank, and demolished the campus. Ten policemen who were on guard at the hostel fled when they saw the approaching crowd. Staff, girls, and local believers, some of whom were beaten, managed to flee. The Cuttack-based offices of the Brethren in Christ Church in India were also a target, and several pastors and church planters lost all their belongings when their homes were looted and burned. People, including pastors, who had to take refuge in forests, lost everything. They are without food and clothes and at risk of snake bites and malaria.

The Churches and Christian leaders in India have been making persistent efforts for appealing to people to strive for peace and reconciliation. The call given by the Untied Christian Forum comprised of the National Council of Churches in India, the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and the Evangelical Fellowship of India to observe a Day of Prayer and Fasting for Peace and Reconciliation was very well received by Christians all over the country. People at large have appreciated the efforts by various churches to promote and restore trust and goodwill among people of all religions and communities. The Church leaders in India appealed to all members of Christian community in the country to work for the welfare of all sections of people in society in spite of such horrific experiences of violence and death of some members of the community.

The World Council of Churches is deeply disturbed by these developments of religious violence in Orissa and has expressed its concern in a letter by the General Secretary addressed to the Prime Minister of India. A pastoral letter from WCC General Secretary expressing sympathy and solidarity to suffering Christians in Orissa was sent to WCC member churches in India and the National Council of Churches in India.

India, Secular?

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh strongly defended India`s secular credentials when the European Union conveyed its “serious concerns” over attacks on Christians in India. “We are a secular state. We are a multi-religious, multi-cultural nation,” Manmohan Singh said emphatically. “The Constitution guarantees all citizens of India the right to profess and propagate a religion of their choice,” he said. Manmohan Singh admitted there have been “sporadic attacks” on Christian shrines but underlined he had already condemned these incidents as “acts of national shame.”An `act of national shame,` indeed it was. But such gruesome violations of human rights demand a more stern response than this. The Indian Prime Minister was covering it up cosmetically since he had to do it. But the ground realities are absolutely different. As the growing religious extremism and increasing violence against religious minorities in India is putting the secular credibility of India at risk

The reality check India should go in for

Secularism is a term employed most rashly by the Indian National Congress. The Chief Minister of South Indian state, Tamil Nadu made his mind clear regarding this and launched a scathing attack on the Prime Minister.

Questioning the secular credentials of India, Karunanidhi alleged that the Congress was neither a true secular party nor a force that was interested in the country`s integration. Referring to the killings of Sikhs in the north in the wake of assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he wondered whether the Congress could be called a secular party. Secularism was not a term to which the Congress alone could claim ownership; he said asking "have the people given patta (title deed) to the Congress to use the term?"

Karuna Nidhi had carefully chosen his target when attacking the Congress for he was aware that India has not been able to free itself of communalism even after more than sixty years of independence, however much it tries to deny it.

If anything, it has been getting worse year after year. There has not been a single year in post-independence period, which has been free of communal violence though number of incidents may vary.

Indian talks of pluralism, secularism and a great tradition, are made to seem nothing more than a mockery by the Hinduvta dream of carving out a ‘Hindu Rashtra`.

Now there are few incidents that would stun the readers:

In the year 2002 the first reported riot took place in Kozhikode (Calicut), Kerala on 3rd January. In the clashes between two communities (Hindus and Muslims) five persons were killed. The clashes occurred on the question of eve teasing. The whole region came in the grip of violence. More than twenty persons were injured including five women. Properties worth lakhs of rupees were destroyed. The police had to be heavily deployed to bring the situation under control. Kerala in India is generally thought to be free of communal violence, experiencing only occasional frenzy and bout of communal violence. But this time a vicious terror campaign overtook it, aimed at its Christian community.

Gujarat was next to come under the stretch of communal carnage. Nowhere in history can there be found an example of the violence of this kind in India except at the time of partition. The communal carnage in Gujarat shook the entire world. It was difficult to believe such intense communal frenzy could be incited by the BJP for its political gains. More than 2000 people were killed most cruelly in this carnage according to very reliable sources even though Government records show dead to number no more than 1000. What is worse the Chief Mister Narendra Modi justified such frenzy and described it as reaction to action in Godhra. And all this happened with full complicity of the police and bureaucracy. The honest officers who did not allow carnage in their areas were instantly transferred by the Modi Government.

Some ministers who led the mobs have been named in FIRs. Many mosques and mausoleums were demolished and ground was leveled. Some accounts maintain about 700 such religious structures were brought down or severely damaged. Ahmedabad, Baroda, Mehsana and Panchmahal districts were the worst affected districts covering entire north and central Gujarat. Properties worth more than 10,000 crores were looted or burnt, though these figures are disputed. The business loss due to closures and migration of labor is several times this figure. Hundreds of Muslim families were totally uprooted. The carnage continued for more than five months

On 17th March communal incidents took place in Loharu in Bhivani district of Haryana. Loharu was once under a Muslim ruler and was known as Nawwaab of Loharu, which explains the considerable number of Muslims residing in that town. A mob of three hundred incited by the rumour of cow slaughter attacked two mosques and at least 15 shops and houses belonging to the minority community. The police had to fire in the air when the mob could not be controlled by cane charge. When the people belonging to the majority community heard that a cow has been taken for slaughter in one of the mosques, the mosque, and close by shops were set on fire

According to a UNI report quoting the police sources said that a mob of 300 Shiv Sainiks set fire to another mosque near the railway station also including many shops in Purana Bazar. And in this area all 15-20 shops and houses belonging to minority were burnt down. The palace of Nawwab of Loharu was also surrounded by a mob but additional reinforcements were requisitioned from other places which were thus saved from being damaged.

Next incidents of communal violence took place in three places in Rajasthan in which three persons were killed on 25th March on the occasion of Muharram. The immediate provocation was the holding of poornahuti yagnas (a Hindu religious ritual) and Kirtans (devotional songs) for Rama at various temples on the route of Tazia processions. Curfew had to be clamped in the town of Gangapur, 80 kms from Sawai Madhopur, in central Rajasthan where 3 people were killed and 15 injured in police firing.

According to the police violence broke out when activists of the VHP, BJP and Bajrang Dal collected at an ancient Hanumanji Mandir for a Yagna and Kirtan. The police asked them not to gather but they defied police orders and began to shout provocative slogans when the Tazia procession came closer to the temple. The police was compelled to open fire when tear-gassing and cane charge had no effect.

The Gangapur city has 25% Muslim population and earlier was considered to be the stronghold of SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) in Rajasthan. It has always been prone to minor communal irritations although this is the first time that violence has erupted on such a large scale. In different parts of Southern Rajasthan where the Sangh Parivar has strong presence communal tension was simmering. But the situation was kept under control.

Christians’ massacre starts again:

The recent wave of the communal violence in Orissa`s Kandhamal district was an `unprecedented` attack on the Christian community in India, according to a rights group in its fact-finding report. `We are saddened to acknowledge that the violence in Orissa, which left at least four killed and 730 houses and 95 churches burnt, will go into the history books as an unprecedented attack on Christians in India,` said Joseph D`Souza, president of the All India Christian Council (AICC). `The tragedy is deepened by the fact that the violence was avoidable if the authorities had enforced the rule of law”.

Bajrang Dal activists have been involved in bomb blasts often blaming it on Muslims, so as to prove their stance on Muslims being responsible for the terror activities in India. Today spokesmen of the Congress led UPA Government in India are asking for a ban on Bajrang Dal. The faster it is done the better it would be for India as a country as there is every reason to believe that it may just implode from within as political parties like BJP have undertaken a mad, mad cannonball run.

RSS/VHP/Bajrang Dal and its activities

The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hegdewar is the ideological fountainhead of the modern Hindutva movement. Organized around the concept of Shakas, a local cell formation where young men would gather for physical and ideological training, under the tutelage of a brother or dada, the RSS ideology as espousing the national cause was articulated over the next decade or more. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who was appointed the head of RSS shortly before his death by Hegdewar, clarified the idea of the nation in his treatise:

"We, or Our Nationhood Defined": We believe that our notions today about the Nation are erroneous... It is but proper therefore, at this stage, to understand what the Western Scholars state as the Universal Nation idea and correct ourselves.

Based on a racial idea of Nation Golwalkar in praise of Hitler says: To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races - the Jews... Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”.

These Hindu extremist organizations are also imparting military training to Hindu youth for taking on non-Hindus. The formal training is now underway to ensure the spread of a militant ideology. The Shiv Sena chief has condoned the arms training of the Bajrang Dal. He also mentioned that the Indian army is ill-prepared for war and that his political party, the Shiv Sena also will be arming their cadre.

At the Sarojini Nagar Camp of Lucknow this is what was released to media: “The number of people being trained in the Sarojini Nagar camp at present is 100. But according to the convener of UP branch of Bajrang Dal, Avadh Bihari Mishra, the objective of this camp is to prepare a group of two thousand trained and active young men who could train a million youth in martial arts and handling of arms in camps at various places. In addition to this, the objective is also to create such atmosphere and mentality which was seen in the country at the time of demolition of Babri Masjid.”

Women branch of RSS/Bajrang Dal armed militants

Among the Sangh Parivar’s affiliate organizations actively participating in giving training in martial arts are the RSS’s women’s branch (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), the Bajrang Dal and the Bajrang Dal’s women’s branch (Durga Vahini). Though training camps and trainings are not new for these organizations (they have been imparting training in “lathi” wielding and riot mongering for a long time), they have now started arming their volunteers in a military pattern.

Though the current training exercises are being carried out with air-guns, the Bajrang Dal state chief Ved Prakash Sachan said he plans to give volunteers a feel of real guns. “This is the induction stage. Later we will train our boys with proper guns and rifles,” he admitted over the telephone, while claiming, “This is part of our drill to ensure protection of Hindus.” Sachan is personally supervising the camp, which was not the first of its kind in the state. According to him, similar camps have been held in Varanasi, Mathura and Meerut.

(Females activists of Durga Vahini, the women wing of Bajrang Dal are being imparted weapons and sword training at its camps for taking part in future activities against minorities.)

Chronology of terrorist activities by Bajrang Dal, RSS

* Aug 25, 2008 : Two die in Kanpur when a bomb explodes. It transpires these were Bajrang Dal activists who were making explosives.

* April 2006: Two Bajrang Dal activists die in Nanded while making bombs. Of them included a suspect of the 2003 Parbhani mosque blasts

* Jan 1999 : Dal mob led by its local leader, Dara Singh, burnt alive a Christian priest Graham Stains and his two little sons in Orissa

And the list continues as the saffron assault brigade takes charge of turning India into a Hindu Rashtra. The Bajrang Dal is said to have been at the forefront of murderous gangs that killed Muslims and burnt their homes in Gujarat in 2002. On several occasions, Dal activists have acted as moral police, catching unmarried couples on Valentine`s Day and forcing them to apply sindoor or tie rakhi against their wishes. The record of Bajrang Dal`s lawlessness is endless. And now the Dal, the 24-year-old sword-arm of the Hindutva brigade, is in the news again — as almost always, for wrong reasons. A number of political leaders have been demanding its ban.

In the middle of September, anti-church violence erupted in Mangalore where prayer halls of the evangelist New Life order were attacked. Soon violence enveloped other denominations, and then churches in the new economy city of Bangalore were vandalized. A month earlier similar anti-Christian attacks rocked Orissa and trouble is still simmering there.

In the middle of the violence that broke out in Mangalore was the figure of Mahendra Kumar, Bajrang Dal "convener" for the state, who claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, said they were a "spontaneous Hindu upsurge". While the Dal said it was inflamed by New Life`s "conversion activities", prayer halls were not the only targets. The Adoration monastery, where nuns live a cloistered life, dedicated to prayer, was not spared either, its windows broken and crucifix vandalized. Saffron groups and Christian organizations have clashed over conversions and re-conversions as they jostle for influence from remote tribal homelands of Rajasthan`s Banswara to the north-east.

Human Rights report of violence against Christains/Minorities in India by saffron parties

“Christians are the new scapegoat in India`s political battles. Without immediate and decisive action by the government, communal tensions will continue to be exploited for political and economic ends”, says Smita Narula

Researcher, Asia Division of Human Rights Watch

The problem is that poverty is eating into India and the people are finding Christianity a lucrative option with many NGO’s working overnight for conversions. Conversions are not forced upon yet they number highly due to the desperate living conditions in India which have been worsened by the food shortages. An escape from death in return of a faith that has only served them humiliation is considered a fair deal by many downtrodden Indians. It is basically in Northeast of India that includes states like interiors of Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura where conversions have been high. Down South it is Orrissa, Kerala, Karnataka where Christain NGO’s have gone overboard with the conversions. And that is irking the saffron parties since they are seeing this to their own dream of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and that is where the problem begins.

The Indian government has failed to prevent increasing violence against Christians and is exploiting communal tensions for political ends, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released this month. The 37-page report, Politics by Other Means: Attacks Against Christians in India, details of violence against Christians in the months ahead of the country`s national parliamentary elections in September and October 1999, and in the months following electoral victory by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People`s Party, known as the BJP) in the state of Gujarat.

Attacks against Christians throughout the country have increased significantly since the BJP began its rule in mid of March 1998. They include the killings of priests, the raping of nuns, and the physical destruction of Christian institutions, schools, churches, colleges, and cemeteries. Thousands of Christians have also been forced to convert to Hinduism.

The report concludes that as with attacks against Muslims in 1992 and 1993, attacks against Christians are part of a concerted campaign of right-wing Hindu organizations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar, to promote and exploit communal clashes to increase their political power-base. The movement is supported at the local level by militant groups who operate with impunity.

Conclusion:

When Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, a charismatic Hindu priest fond of railing against Christian missionaries, was shot dead in the eastern state of Orissa in August, police blamed “Naxalite” Maoists. But hardliner Hindu groups decided Christians were responsible. In an ensuing rampage, dozens of churches were burned, tens of thousands of Christians fled their homes, and at least 20 people died. By this week the violence had touched four more states. In Karnataka in the south, 20 churches have been desecrated in a few days.

India’s Hindu majority and its tiny Christian minority mostly rub along peacefully. But since the early 1990s, the rise of ideological Hindutva (“Hinduness”) and of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), now the main opposition, has seen intermittent outbreaks of sometimes vicious agitation against Christian missionaries. They are accused of forcibly converting poor Hindus. Gauri Prasad Rath, general secretary of the Vishnu Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, in Orissa, says that the thuggery was caused by, “the fraudulent conversions Christians are doing. They burned their own churches.”

However the claims of VHP are mere accusations as all the funds Christian organizations get from abroad are thoroughly monitored by government in India, as opposed to the huge funds Hindu extremist organizations like VHP, RSS and Bajrand Dal spending on different terrorist activities which have never been audited.

It is true that missionaries are busy in much of India, especially the tribal belt that runs through Orissa. Here, traditionally nature-worshipping forest dwellers, among India’s poorest people, have found institutional Christianity, with its free schools and health care, especially attractive. Indeed many church leaders believe that the proportion of Indian Christians is a couple of percentage points higher than the census reckoning of 2.3%. In six of the 12 states ruled by the BJP, either on its own or in coalition, laws designed to discourage Hindus from switching faiths by banning forced conversions have been introduced. Convictions, however, are rare. Muhammed Shafi Qureshi, chairman of the government-appointed National Commission for Minorities, says on inquiring as to how many people had been convicted under the state’s 1967 law; the answer was none.

Tensions have been exacerbated by a row over “reservations”, the affirmative-action benefits, such as privileged access to government jobs and education, afforded to low-caste Hindus.

Most Hindu converts to Christianity come from the lower castes but lose these benefits when they switch faiths. Their calls for inclusion in the system have infuriated many Hindus.

With general elections due by next May, such issues have proved effective rallying cries for Hindu groups aligned with the BJP. Mr Qureshi points out that Karnataka, scene of some of the worst violence, this year voted in its first BJP government. The party is also part of the ruling coalition in Orissa. “This madness”, he says, “is political.”

Every conflict can be explained in more than one way, but historians know that one way of sifting out bad explanations is to look for plausibility.

Here, we’re being asked to believe that the thousands of extremely poor people who make up the populations of these relief camps are self-arsonists running a compensation scam. This is not just a bad explanation; it’s an explanation made in bad faith. What we’re seeing in Orissa is the attempt to replicate Gujarat’s ‘success’ and Golwalkar’s object on a smaller scale. Thus, Christians are driven out of their homes to live in limbo as destitute, vagrant wards of the State in camps, or else allowed to return to their villages as neo-Hindus purged of an alien possession. This is, or should be, unacceptable. The use of murder, rape and arson against civilian communities to achieve a political object (in this case ethnic cleansing) is a form of terror, and this republic’s government needs to treat it as such.

As the violence spreads to many districts of India against Christians after Orissa episode, other minorities including Muslism are also being targetted. Just today (October 12, 2008, Sunday) six Muslims of a family including 3 children were burnt to death at Watoli village Andhra Pardesh district when their house was set on fire. The village is 13 km far from the communal violence-hit Bhainsa town. Three bodies were charred beyond recognition, the rest were burnt partially, police said.

Keeping in view the numerous incidents of violence and massacre of minorities at the hands of extremist Hindus in India, the credentials of being a Secular country are highly questionable.

The slogan of being biggest democracy and a secular country seems only a rhetoric and catchy phrase to bluff the world.

Though recently US and UN have expressed concern over massacre of Christians by Hindu fanatics in India but there is a need for more strong a measure to be taken by the international community in this regard.

The world should take notice of the brutalities being meted to minorities including Christians and Muslims and low cast Dalits by Hindu extremists in India; the matter should be taken for debate in the United Nations by the world so that these oppressed people of India can get some justice.

The bodies of a poverty-ridden Indian man and eight members of his family were found shot, beheaded and floating in a river after an alleged revenge killing for his having married a wealthy woman, Reuters reported.

Police from Bihar, in eastern India, said they have charged 15 people, most of whom are from the bride's family, with the murders.

The killings took place over the weekend after 21-year-old Ratan Mandal eloped with 18-year-old Kanchan Kumari, fearing their families would not approve if they did not keep the wedding a secret.

"The girl's family invited the boy's family for a meeting on the pretext of settling the dispute, but killed all eight and beheaded them," Raghunath Prasad Singh, a senior police officer from Bhagalpur, told Reuters.

Bhagalpur is well known for revenge and honor killings when men and women dare to marry outside their caste, Reuters reported.

A study done by Medecins Sans Frontieres in mid 2005 reveals that Kashmiri women are among the worst sufferers of sexual violence in the world. Interestingly, the figure is much higher than that of Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Chechnya

Inspite of the fact that the violations of human rights in Kashmir are in direct disregard of the principles of international human rights and humanitarian law including the Geneva Conventions and the protocols additional thereto, no attention has been directed to address the issue at national and international levels. An appropriate response is necessitated by the fact that the violations of human rights in Kashmir's armed conflict have had a direct bearing on its civilian population. Civilian victims, mostly women and children, often outnumber casualties among the combatants [1]. But women suffer in both differing and complex forms. They suffer directly by being subject to rape, molestation and torture and others whose relations are subject to atrocities suffer because of being related to them. It therefore becomes imperative to try and analyse the impact that the past 18 years of conflict have had on Kashmiri women. More so, because there needs to be an awareness and understanding that armed conflict and its impact affect women physically, psychologically, socially and economically [2]. The International Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC) places the impact of armed conflict on women under eight themes: Displacement, security, sexual violence, missing persons, detention, access to medicare, access to food and other assistance and protection under international humanitarian law [3].

Rape casesA study done by Medecins Sans Frontieres in mid 2005 reveals that Kashmiri women are among the worst sufferers of sexual violence in the world. It further mentions that since the beginning of the armed struggle in Kashmir in 1989, sexual violence has been routinely perpetrated on Kashmiri women, with 11.6 per cent of respondents saying they were victims of sexual abuse. Interestingly, the figure is much higher than that of Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Chechnya. The state home department has no specific data in this regard for the last 17 years. This serves as a telling comment on the plight of women and on the indifferent attitude of the state towards addressing the issue. Cases of rape and molestation abound in Kashmir and many go unreported because of the fear of social stigma, and of reprisal by state agencies. And even in those cases, where the victims manage to transcend these fears and report the matter to police, they achieve little or no justice. More often, police refuses to lodge an FIR against the troops.

In Kunan Poshpora, a small village in Kashmir, the soldiers of fourth Rajputana Rifles allegedly raped about 30 women on the night of February 23, 1991, during a search operation while men were taken away from their homes and interrogated. The ages of women raped ranged from 13 to 80 years. According to newspaper reports, on June 17,1994, troops of Rashtriya Rifles accompanied by two officers Major Ramesh and Major Rajkumar entered into village Hyhama and allegedly raped and molested seven women. In another incident, troops raped a mentally ill old woman in her house in Barbarshah in Srinagar on January 5, 1991. Medical reports confirmed rape and locals lodged an FIR with the concerned police station, but the police did no investigation. She later died in 1998 while the FIR still awaits action from the state government. In another gruesome incident, an army Major in Badra, Handwara, raped Aisha, a 29-year-old woman and her 10-year-old daughter, Shabnum. These being just a few examples, incidents like these are plenty in Kashmir and ironically pass unheeded for.

Due to immunity of troops from prosecution and their own court martial proceedings, which are far from being unbiased, they are left free to do as they please. Dr Maiti, a professor of political science at Rurdwa University, West Bengal, explains, "Rape continues to be a major instrument of Indian oppression against the Kashmiri people while the majority of victims are civilians. This concept stands fortified by a report of ICRC dated March 6, 2001, where it has been mentioned that women are raped in order to humiliate, frighten and defeat the enemy 'group' to which they belong. Rape in a war is not merely a matter of chance; it is rather a question of power and control, which is 'structured by male soldiers' notions of their masculine privilege, by the strength of the military line of command and by class and ethnic inequalities among women [4].

One of the reasons given by Radhika Coomaraswamy for sexual violence in armed conflict is that violence against women may be directed towards the social group of which she is a member because 'to rape a woman is to humiliate her community'. Complex and combined emotions of hatred, superiority, vengeance for real or imagined wrongs and national pride are engendered and deliberately manipulated in armed conflict. For the men of the community, rape encapsulates the totality of their defeat; they have failed to protect their women [5].

The Special Rapporteur appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in former Yugoslavia termed rape as not only as an instrument of war but as a method of ethnic cleansing intended to humiliate, shame, degrade and terrify the entire ethnic group [6].

The Geneva Convention related to The Protection of Civilian Persons In Times Of War, 1949 and Additional Protocols of 1977 provide that women shall especially be protected against humiliating and degrading treatment; rape, enforced prostitution or any form of indecent assault [7]. The Vienna Declaration and Programme Of Action adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in Situations of Armed Conflict states that violations of human rights of women in situations of armed conflict are violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. Even though states are under an obligation to make grave breaches of Geneva Conventions and protocols additional thereto subject to the jurisdiction of their own courts and punishable by severe penalties. The domestic courts do not peruse the law laid down under the said convention for rape trials in conflict areas like Kashmir. However, rape is not explicitly listed as a grave breach of Geneva Convention, although acts willfully committed and causing great suffering or causing grave injury to body or health do constitute breaches. The fact that rape has been systematically committed against Kashmiri women and that justice has not been delivered in these cases makes rape in Kashmir eligible for an appropriate legal response at the international level. The state has to be held for breach of its obligations under various relevant treaties and customary international law. The prosecution of individuals alleged to have committed rape should be done by the international criminal tribunal on the precedent of Nuremberg as the domestic courts and military court-martials have failed to deliver justice in these matters and are motivated by a state centric approach [8]. The focus of the tribunal should be to punish the wrongdoers, not on providing compensation and support to the victim.

The International tribunals are unique in that, they can be established during the continuation of the conflict and therefore they are untainted by the notions of 'victors justice'. Prosecutions must be brought against the alleged perpetrators and those higher up in the chain of command [9]. Rape is a grave crime as its consequences extend beyond the actual commission, often lasting for the rest of the life of a woman [10]. The social stigma associated with rape renders a raped woman unmarriageable, deprived of respect in the society and traumatised for the rest of her life. In some cases women become unacceptable even to their own families. The necessity to bring the perpetrators of rapes in Kashmir to justice can be understood from the fact that parties to conflict often rape as a tactic of war and terrorism [11].

Half-widows of the ValleyEnforced disappearance is one of the most harrowing consequences of the armed conflict in Kashmir. During the last 18 years of conflict, the Association Of Parents Of Disappeared Persons (APDP) [12], an organisation of the relatives of people who have disappeared after custody, claims more than 10,000 people have been subject to enforced disappearance by state agencies and were mostly picked up by the troops. Of the disappeared persons, between 2000-2005 a majority were married males. Although men have been subject to disappearance largely, but women have been adversely affected because of being related to them as daughters, mothers, sisters and wives. In the absence of any information about the whereabouts of the disappeared men, their wives have acquired the title of ' half-widows'. These half-widows apart from other relatives of disappeared persons are left without any entitlement to land, homes, inheritance, social assistance and pensions. Most of these women also suffer from harassment by the troops.

Fahmeeda Bano, 37, lives in a remote Kashmir village of Kupwara and 14 years back the Indian army picked up her husband. She has gone from pillar to post searching for him but to no avail. She said, "If my husband is alive I want to see him. I want authorities to tell me where he is. If he has been killed let them hand over his body to me..."

The Indian government does not provide any relief to half-widows before the expiry of seven years from the date of disappearance. And even after the completion of seven years from the date of disappearance, they get either a one-time grant ranging from US$1,000 and US$2,000 or a monthly pension of US$10 [13]. Further, a half-widow cannot remarry until the expiration of seven years from the date of disappearance of her husband whose whereabouts must not be known in these seven years. In the meantime, the right to her husband's property are often threatened. Some widows, who intend to remarry, largely do not find men who are willing to marry them. A study titled, 'Women And Children Under The Armed Conflict In Kashmir' done by Prof A G Madhosh, a Kashmiri educationist and activist, reveals that the migration of widows with their children resulted in a sudden break in normal family life. Women had to assume the roles of breadwinners for their families and the future of their children became insecure. Every month the members of APDP gather for a sit-in-protest at Central Park in Srinagar. Their continuous protests should have served as a resonating alarm for the authorities, but they seem to have turned a deaf ear to the woes of these people. Fahmeeda Bano, 37, lives in a remote Kashmir village of Kupwara and 14 years back the Indian army picked up her husband. She has gone from pillar to post searching for him but to no avail. She said, "If my husband is alive I want to see him. I want authorities to tell me where he is. If he has been killed let them hand over his body to me. [14]"

Psychological ImpactWith killings, torture, rapes, molestations, disappearances and detentions becoming the order of the day in Kashmir, psychiatric disorders have seen a sharp increase post-1989. In 1989, about 1,700 patients visited the valley's lone psychiatric hospital and by the year 2003, the number had gone up to 48,000. Before the onset of the armed struggle, certain disorders that were not known to Kashmiris started showing a significant presence amongst the civilian population. The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD), one of the psychiatric diseases, which was completely unrecognised before 1990 has witnessed a major upsurge. Major Depressive Disorder (MDO) follows this. There are other mental diseases like bipolar disorder, panic, phobia; general anxiety and sleep disorders that have also shown four-fold increase as told by Dr Arshad of the Psychiatric Diseases Hospital in Srinagar. Substance Use Disorder or drug addiction and suicidal tendencies has been another repercussion of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. Dr Arshad further added that the patients who come to seek help are largely in the productive age group of 25-30 years [15]. Dr Mushtaq Marghoob, a leading psychiatrist of the valley states that women bear the brunt of every tragedy. They have to support the family after the death of their husbands, fathers, sons or brothers. Dr Arshad further adds that women form a major part of the patients who are suffering from PSTD (almost 50 per cent). For women whose husbands have died, psychotherapy has failed to produce desired results.

A woman from Batmaloo, Srinagar saw the body of her brother who was killed in custody by soldiers of the Indian army, the body had been split open and his heart had been taken out. The shock rendered her in a state of disturbed bereavement and PSTD ever since. According to Dr Marghoob, women have become increasingly suicidal and are resorting to sleeping pills, injections and inhalations [16]. Even though a large number of people visit the Psychiatric Diseases Hospital in Srinagar, however, this is only a tip of the iceberg as large numbers of patients visit hospitals at the district and sub-district levels.

Nearly every person, particularly women, suffer from general anxiety and the uncertainty pertaining to the security of their family members. This always keep them in a state of unrest and anxiety. Even in their houses people are harassed, beaten up or taken into custody by the troops. The fact that the situation doesn't seem to get any better, doesn't promise a better mental state of the civilian population, especially women, in Kashmir.

In past few years, murders, rapes, torture, custodial deaths, and enforced disappearances have witnessed an upsurge, but the response of the state in addressing these atrocities doesn't promise hope for justice. The official figures of these atrocities are far too less than the reported ones. The factual human rights situation in Kashmir has always been rendered invisible by the national security concerns of the government and the state centric approach of the Indian media [17]. Living in this environment of hopelessness, there are people like Parveena who are still willing to give a tough fight to powers-that-be. Parveena says, "I am determined to fight till my last breath, with or without anyone's support". People like Parveena need to be lauded for their determination.

It is being constantly projected in the mainstream media that the situation in Kashmir has improved, but the ever-increasing rate of human rights violations in the valley tell us a different story. People continue to suffer while the much-hyped slogan of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh proclaiming 'Zero Tolerance' towards human rights abuse stares him hard in the face!

Hakim Bey: Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head
Napoleon Bonaparte: The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!

Hakim Bey: Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head
Napoleon Bonaparte: The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!

Is Pakistan really the 'Epicenter of Terrorism' or the 'Migraine of the World?' Truth does come out sooner or later. While they are busy blaming us for all evil in the Universe, the 'Natural Allies' were responsible for it all along! Also, if the Kashmir problem was resolved according to the wishes of Kashmiris then most of the groups like LeT, Harkatul Mujahideen, Al Badr, Jamat-ul-Mujahid and Hizbul Mujahideen most probably won't even have existed.

Also, they forgot to add the names of terrorists organizations like BJP, RSS, VHP, etc. that are headed by Mass Murderers like Advani, Modi, etc.

India has largest number of domestic terror groups:

Mumbai, Wednesday, June 24, 2009: The CPI (Maoist) swells the list of indigenous terror groups operating on our soil to 27, making India home to the largest number of domestic terrorist organisations in the world. On Monday, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) named the CPI (Maoist) as 34th terrorist organisation under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act; seven of these are transnational terror groups.

CPI (Maoist) joined ranks with Ulfa and SIMI and lesser known entities such as Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council of Meghalaya, Kanglei Yaol Kanba Lup of Manipur and Akhil Bharat Nepali Ekta Samaj, which though virtually unheard of are considered deadly enough by the government to be designated as terrorist organisations.

Of the seven transnational terror groups, only two —al-Qaida and LTTE — are truly global names. The other five are Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Harkatul Mujahideen, Al Badr, Jamat-ul-Mujahid and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) which are all Pakistan based terror outfits fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir.

"I am not surprised that we have so many local terror groups," said Prakash Singh, former director-general of Border Security Force (BSF). "Since Independence we have seen the rise of a new terrorist movement in every decade, whether it be the Naxals, militants in Punjab, terrorists in the North East or in J&K. It is failure of governance that has led to this situation," Singh said.

Going by number of organisations that other countries currently designate as terrorist, they too feel threatened by a number of groups. But none of them have as many home grown extremist groups as India does. The list runs into more than 40 in both US and Canada but includes only international names such as Hezbollah, Hamas, FARC, Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional, Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) etc — none of which operate directly on their soil.

Amongst developed countries, only UK has a significant number of terror groups breeding close to home in form of nine Irish militias such as the Ulster Freedom Fighters and the Irish Republican Army.

"India is a large country with such great diversity and so many grievances. This complexity leads to growth of radicals who survive on extremist ideology and terror. Developed countries have not had to deal with problems like ours that breed extremism," said intelligence affairs expert B Raman.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

New Delhi, Friday, July 03, 2009: After 17 long years, 48 shameless extensions and 399 hearings, and significantly after many a regime and many a turns in the body polity of India, a Commission tasked with probing who and how demolished the much revered Babri Moque in UP's heartland Ayodhya hurting sentiments of the Muslim community and all sane people across the world, has finally submitted its so called confidential report to the Prime Minister.

In keeping with the way Indian politics and law machinery works, the report leaked out in torrents, but one thing became clear. Justice (retired) M S Liberhan, though blaming several senior leaders of the BJP for the demolition of the Masjid on December 6, 1992, has not really been able to pin down L K Advani as Guilty Number One and the RSS as the organization that deserves immediate ban for its hate agenda.

The four-volume report did hold then Congress prime minister P V Narasimha Rao responsible for not doing enough to stop the demolition. Rao is no more. Incidentally, Rao was the home minister when murderous mobs led by Congress leaders like Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar killed and burnt alive hundreds of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.

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Shame Writ Large:

The Babri Mosque Demolition, Dec 06, 1992.

Who can forget Advani's words? "Kar Sewaks are not going to Ayodhya to sing bhajan kirtan." Clearly, Advani knew and guided them about what they were to do. And who can turn his face away from what Kalyan Singh asserted before the Liberhan Commission. He said the demolition of the mosque was an act of God and he had no regrets, no repentance, no sorrow and no grief. Uma Bharti, the quintessential child of the RSS, was her candid self even on Tuesday: “Like a good commander, I am ready to own responsibility for the demolition and I have no problem even if I’m hanged on the issue.”

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India is yet to even mull about probing the Indian Army attack on Goden Temple of Sikhs, Sri Akal Takht and many other gurdwaras that left thousands of innocents dead, the Akal Takht in rubble and the Sikh psyche hurt beyond repair.

The Sikh community stood in solidarity with the Muslim minority on the question of Babri Mosque demolition and has been demanding justice.

The Liberhan report blamed L K Advani for creating an environment that led to the demolition of the mosque through his rath yatra in 1990 but he was not held directly responsible.

The others reportedly named in the report were the BJP’s Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and Vinay Katiyar; VHP’s Ashok Singhal and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh. Hindu activists demolished the 16th century Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 as Advani and senior BJP leaders looked on from a distance. Many of these leaders are being tried in UP courts for alleged complicity.

Over 2,000 people died in the communal riots that followed. The 16th century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed by a 150,000-strong mob belonging allegedly to the right-wing Hindu revivalist organisation RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and its affiliates in the presence of top BJP leaders.

Even though the saffron parivar is being largely blamed in this case, the Congress itself has for long led a policy of alternating soft and hard varieties of Hindutva. Even now, it may choose not to table the report immediately in Parliament, but if accepted, the report will lead to fresh cases against those indicted.

Advani’s discharge has been challenged in the Supreme Court. The case against Kar sewaks (religious volunteers) who demolished the mosque is pending in the special CBI court, Lucknow. The Liberhan commission was appointed within 10 days with a brief to go into the sequence of events leading up to the demolition. It was given six months to give a report, but took 17 years.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

NEW DELHI: At least 60 Christians have been killed over the past two months in eastern India in a brutal backlash to the murder of a revered Hindu holy man, a national bishops' body said Friday.The figure is nearly double the official toll of 35 given by government authorities in the eastern state of Orissa. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India said scores of Christians were still fleeing their homes in Orissa and called for action to stem the religious violence in the state's troubled Kandhamal district.

‘Christians are afraid to return to their villages as threats of death have forced many of them to flee to the forest or live in dehumanising conditions,’ the organisation said. ‘The fear that has driven thousands into the forests for shelter and safety is a living reproach to those who should provide safety and security and not leave the law and order situation to mob rule,’ the organisation added.

The comments came less than a week after Pope Benedict XVI renewed his condemnation of attacks on Indian Christians. The bishops' group also demanded a federal probe into the rape of a Catholic nun in Kandhamal, the epicentre of the violence.

According to AFP, there was no immediate reaction to the figures from Orissa state government officials. The Orissa government, administered by a political party aligned to India's main Hindu nationalist grouping, says it has deployed enough troops to quell the violence.

Hakim Bey: Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head
Napoleon Bonaparte: The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!

"We were told that boys had come from outside. They were not like us. They wore jeans and T-shirts. I knew about the bombs ... I backed out because they were not keeping their promise. Instead of targeting the VHP, they were planting bombs in crowded places to kill innocents"

The Gujarat Police took quick credit for arresting the masterminds behind the July 2008 blasts in Ahmedabad. Rana Ayyub tracks the police’s star witness to find he has been tortured into falsely implicating the ‘masterminds’. An exclusive report

Witness

Tehelka Magazine - Vol 6, Issue 31, Dated August 08, 2009: He has a name, but lets just call him ‘Witness’. He had a life too — like yours and mine — till 26 July 2008, when serial blasts shook Ahmedabad. Between 6:45 PM and 7:55 PM that evening, 16 bombs exploded in various parts of the city, including in a hospital where the injured were being rushed to. As the death toll reached 56, Witness had only one thought – he could have been responsible for the bloodletting, the mayhem, the death of innocents.

He almost was. Witness was in on the plot. He knew bicycles were being bought. He knew low-intensity explosive devices were being assembled. He knew they would be concealed in tiffin boxes and the boxes placed in the bicycles. But Witness withdrew at the last minute — barely 24 hours before 6:45PM in the evening — when he learnt that the target areas had changed. As the plot was being hatched in meetings Witness attended before July 26, he was given to believe that RSS and Bajrang Dal offices would be targeted. But the script changed. Witness withdrew when he realised that innocent people in crowded places would be slaughtered.

The Gujarat Police was quick to blame the blasts on the Indian Mujahideen (IM), the same group held responsible for the blasts in Jaipur on 13 May 2008. But when different states paraded different faces, all proclaiming their catches as the IM’s mastermind, Tehelka started an investigation that led it to Witness.

A forensic team investigates the site of one of the serial bomb blasts that took place in Ahmedabad on 27 July 2008

The testimony of Witness is important — and credible — for several reasons. First and foremost, because he indicts himself, openly admitting he was part of the plot till the last moment. This gives his words credence. His words gain even more credence because he has given more or less the same narrative to the Gujarat Police. The narrative changes at one crucial place – when he reels off the names of the men behind the Gujarat blasts. But wait. Witness has told Tehelka that he was physically tortured by the police into naming innocents, that he could not bear the physical and mental torture he was subjected to. They were not responsible for the serial bombings, he swears.

I, Tehelka’s special correspondent, landed up at his house in Juhapura, accompanied by the wife and daughter of an accused in the case. Witness’ sister opens the door. Her brother is not home, she says. As I speak to her, a male voice asks from inside, “Who’s there?” When she does not answer, a man comes to the door. He is around 22, dressed in kurta and jeans, just like any college student. The lady with me says, “He is the one.” Yes, this is the Gujarat police’s star witness. The police arrested people on the basis of Witness’ statements. The police said its claim that the Gujarat blasts was the work of the Indian Mujahideen, a reincarnation of the Student’s Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was proven by Witness’ statements. It is on the basis of Witness’ statement that the police have named the masterminds in the case – Mufti Abu Bashar and Sajid Mansuri.

At first, Witness is unwilling to talk. He is preparing for exams, he says. He sees the lady accompanying me and asks her what she is doing with me. I have smuggled myself in, wearing a head scarf, trying to pass off as one of them. He lifts up the lady’s child in his arms and allows us in, looking around to see if we have been spotted. After keeping in him detention for twelve days and beating the confession out of him, the police now keep an eye on their ‘approver’.

Casualties of the Ahmedabad bomb blasts wait for treatment at a hospital

Witness bursts into tears when I ask him questions. “Don’t make me narrate everything again. My family and I have gone through hell all because of me. It was all a big mistake,” he says between sobs.

His mother, an ailing lady in her late 50s enters. She wants to know if we too are from the police. “How many questions do you want to ask him? He has told you everything he knows. Now leave him alone!” she says. Witness ushers her out and bolts the door.

“I wouldn’t be talking had it not been for this girl,” he says, gesturing at the girl now sleeping snugly in her mother’s arms. “Her father is innocent, ma’am. They are all innocent. If what I say to you can do anything, then please get them freed. They are in jail for no fault of theirs.”

Witness was detained days after the blasts in Ahmedabad took place in July last year. He was part of the plot until he learnt the targets included hospitals and not those responsible for the 2002 Gujarat riots. Until he learnt that they were not going to kill the ‘Bajrangis’ or those who had admitted to having slit open the stomachs of pregnant women during the riots.

Alleged SIMI operatives being paraded before the media by the police

They (the conspirators) had told us that they wanted to avenge the atrocities committed against Muslims but what they were doing would also kill Muslims,” says Witness. Although he was never told who the top bosses were, he carried out the orders of his fellow plotters.

Witness also reveals troubling truths – he denies ever being a part of SIMI. He denies the involvement of SIMI in the plot and says he knows the Indian Mujahideen only as a phrase seen in newspapers. Witness says he was tortured into implicating the men he met during Friday prayers. “The police forced me to name those they had arrested.” Our long conversation was occasionally interrupted by his mother’s knocks on the door. She was both scared and curious but Witness wanted to talk. He wanted to unburden himself and reveal everything; all in the hope that it would help free those innocent people languishing in jail.

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The Witness was party to the plot. He knew the bicycles were being bought. He knew the low-intensity explosive devices were being assembled but he backed out at the last minute, just before 6:45 PM

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The words came in a torrent and he spoke, initially without much prodding. “My friend Alamzeb Afridi (absconding, involved along with Witness in the blasts) introduced me to Yakub bhai (earlier detained, now a witness), Arif Kagzi, Yunus Mansuri and Sajid Mansuri (all accused in the July 2008 Ahmedabad blasts and all ex-SIMI members who spoke to Tehelka in Sabarmati jail). They told me that they used to be SIMI members. I knew Alamzeb from college. We used to meet in the evenings for religious discourses. We would discuss the Quran and often attended various programs at Yaqub bhai’s place. These guys would only teach us about the hadees (the Prophet’s statements and actions) and would tell us about the life of the Prophet. I was told that after SIMI was banned, they would hold educational programmes to explain the true meaning of Islam to youngsters who were disillusioned. People like Abdul Subhan Qureishi (one of the masterminds of the plot, now absconding) and Safdar Nagori (General Secretary, SIMI) used to come there. I was told that Subhan worked with Wipro and that he had been absconding ever since his name came up connection with the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts. He said that he was not involved in the blasts. He said that the group hated the hardliners and wanted to work against the propaganda put out by the VHP and the RSS. This was in 2007.

In the meetings we were told how Muslims were being tortured in Afghanistan, America and Palestine. Subhan Qureishi used to tell us that these were the real people who were against Islam. Of all the people who attended, Abu Bashar Siddiqui was perhaps the most reserved of all. He had tremendous knowledge about the Quran and the hadees and used to speak about the true essence of Islam. Those meetings were not conspiracy sessions. In them, no one ever spoke about the plot. Subhan used to bring Abu Bashar Siddiqui for the religious gatherings and it was very clear that he did not discuss anything else with him.

There was an annual meeting of SIMI every year. In 2007, it took place in Indore. They just wanted the ban on SIMI to be lifted. It was there that Safdar Nagori and others were arrested. Subhan and Qayamuddin Kapadia (recently arrested, named by Witness as being involved in the blasts) were also to reach there but they said they had missed their train. They returned to Ahmedabad two weeks later. Alamzeb, Mujeeb (another ex-SIMI member, now in jail), Tauseef (a localite accused in the case, now in jail) and I had continued to meet after namaz.

Chain of Evidence SIMI leader Safdar Nagori after being arrested from a house in Indore’s Manikbag locality

After the Indore arrests of SIMI cadres, Subhan Qureishi met Mujeeb, Alamzeb, and me and told us that we had to do something to avenge the Gujarat riots. Subhan first approached the SIMI guys. They told him outright that they did not wish to be a part of anything and that they were struggling to lead a normal life as had been tortured enough by the Gujarat police for being SIMI members. These people could not even carry on their normal jobs. Qayamuddin was also absconding then as the police was after him. The first time Subhan and Qayamuddin met us was at a shop at the Dani Limda area in Ahmedabad. We were told not to involve the SIMI people and also to take in new people with no records. Arif and the others told Subhan not to do anything destructive.

Subhan then gave us Rs 3,000 to enrol in some physical fitness courses like swimming. We did that for a month. Only the three of us — Mujeeb, Alamzeb and me — knew about it. Qayamuddin was our leader. We were asked to stay away from SIMI members, as they would have stopped us. We did not meet any SIMI member. Subhan and Qayamuddin had tried to gauge who could do the task and had told just the three of us.

Qayamuddin got a CD just a month before the blasts. The CD was shown to Mufti Abu Bashar as he was the only one who could understand Arabic. A few days afterwards, Qayamuddin came to us and told us that some boys had come from outside who were well trained and who wanted to do something. None of us knew them. Nobody knew them. We were only given orders. When Qayamuddin mentioned bombs, I said that the original plan was to attack the VHP headquarters and not kill common people. He retorted that even if we didn’t help them, the boys from outside would set off the bombs. He said they wouldn’t wait for us and told us that if we helped them, they would be able to place the explosives at the right places and would be able to take revenge against the right people.

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‘We saw what happened in Godhra. It was wrong. We saw the VHP men talking about slitting the stomachs of pregnant women. We just wanted to show them how it feels when your own are killed,’ he says

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We then agreed to the plan. Qayamuddin then gave us Rs 5,000 and asked us to buy 10 cycles. At that time my exams were on. Alamzeb bought six bicycles and gave me three. I parked them at places where no one would touch them and Alamzeb parked his cycles too. Later, Qayamuddin called us. We asked him about the bombs and how many casualties they would cause. Initially, they said the bombs would be kept in buses and we were asked to identify the right buses. We then confronted them, saying that people in buses were not our targets. We said we should set off the bombs in places were Hindus dominate and where it is difficult for Muslims even to enter. The places they had chosen were areas like Paldi, which also had a large number of Muslims.

The targets were then changed to areas like Maninagar and Satellite. Qayamuddin later took me with him and showed me places like Naroda (one of the worst hit during the Gujarat 2002 riots) and told me that these were the places were we needed to plant the bombs. I was told to just look at the areas. After we came back from Naroda, we met Mujeeb who was waiting for us near the Vadodara express highway. Qayamuddin then told me that I did not appreciate what we were doing and that I was too busy with college. I retorted that that was because they were not keeping their promise to attack the VHP. I told them I did not want to be a part of the plan.

Abdul Subhan Qureishi, named by the police and by Witness as one of the masterminds of the Ahmedabad blasts

Q: Did you know Sadiq Israr Ahmed? (in custody with the Mumbai police, named as one of the IM masterminds and accused in the Ahmedabad blasts. Recently cleared by a Mumbai court of involvement in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts) Was he ever a part of the plan?

A: No. I’ve never heard of him. If the SIMI members found out about our plan, they would never have let us go ahead with it.

Q: Did any of you go to Pakistan or any other country?

A: No, never. The names I have read in the chargesheet are just names to us. We only heard about them on TV. SIMI was just a small organisation. Poor Abu Bashar had no idea what was going on. Whenever he was around, we never spoke about the plot. In fact we were told never to discuss anything with SIMI. The only reason Abu Bashar has been implicated in the case is because he used to attend tableeghi jamaats (religious conferences) across the country and was also very keen that the ban on SIMI be lifted. He was perhaps the only one who would speak to us about the true meaning of Islam.

After I said I wouldn’t be a part of the plot, I was removed from the group. It was only on the morning of the blasts when Alamzeb came in to get the cycles that I felt something was about to happen. I told him where the bicycles were parked and then went to college. It was only after I returned that I realised that the blasts had taken place. After the blasts, the group avoided me. Even when they met me they asked me not to discuss the plot.

The only fault of Zahid Sheikh (a friend of Witness arrested by the police and accused in the case. Also accused of attending terror camps in Ahmedabad) and others who have been arrested is that someone told him that the blasts were done by this group. I met Alamzeb five days after the blasts and asked him about the boys from outside. Were they like us – kurta-pyjama clad and bearded? Alamzeb replied that on the contrary, they didn’t look like us. They were welleducated, wore jeans and T-shirts and smoked a lot.

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The Indian mujahideen is a phrase he only knows from the newspapers. He also denies any SIMI role in the Gujarat blasts. ‘If SIMI members knew the plan, they would’ve never let us go ahead with it,’ he says

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Q: Did you know their identity?

A: No ma’am. They never divulged these things. Alamzeb only told me that they had rented a room and that they were extremely well-trained in making bombs. They were not like one of us. There was another person who kept the bombs. There is a stark difference between us and those people. They were like none of our group or any SIMI members we had seen.

Q: You have been named a witness in the case. Your statement says that those named in the chargesheet including Arif, Tauseef, Zahid and the others played an active part in the blasts. Why did you say that? Did they torture you mentally or physically?

A: They first took me to Ashish Bhatia’s office (Joint Commissioner of Police heading the investigations.) They strip you completely. One person sits on one leg and another on the other. They kept me twisted over in a 180 degree position. Like they did to poor Zahid. They trick you. They told him that everyone had named him and that he should take responsibility for the blasts. They did the same to me. I could not stand the pain, so I did what they told me to.

Q: Are those named in the chargesheet involved?

A: How could they be? We knew exactly what was happening from Day One. The people named had no inkling. Naved Kadri, one of them, is from Juhapura, like me. He would get frightened at the thought of blood. His only fault was that he was a friend from Juhapura. He has been chargesheeted as a conspirator. I have seen him being tortured in custody. He is still inside.

Mufti Abu Bashar, accused by the police of involvement in the blasts but cleared of any involvement in them by Witness

Q: Do you see the role of a SIMI insider?

A: The third party with the bombs only came into the picture after the SIMI guys were all inside. How could they do it?

Q: Did you know about the Indian Mujahideen?

A: No. SIMI was banned in 2001. All of them — Safdar Nagori and the rest — were still free. If they had actually received training they would have done the blasts way back. Why would they wait? The blasts happened only after they were arrested. In my lie detector test, they asked me about the IM but I’ve seen this term only in the newspapers.

Q: But you were still a part of the plot. Why did you join it?

A: You know what happened in Gujarat. What happened in Godhra was wrong. The guilty should have been punished. But you know what they did to us. We saw the videos of Babu Bajrangi on TV and the VHP guys talking about slitting the stomachs of pregnant women. Politicians knew that what happened was wrong. The Hindus here knew exactly that it was wrong but they still support Narendra Modi. We just wanted to show them how it feels when your own people are killed.

Q: You were a part of the plot till almost a day before the blasts and you have been let off. But others who don’t even know about the blasts are in jail. Why did this happen?

A: Ma’am, I only know how the plan was hatched and that the cycles were bought. The policemen told me that Yunus Mansuri said I had planted the bomb. I said that in that case, call him; I will face him because I know I have not done so. They told me this before they had even arrested him. Two days later, they arrested him, saying that I had named him. I told them whatever I knew. I know that uninvolved people were suffering, and I told the crime branch that those people were innocent. But they implicated them. There is no such thing as justice. Sub Inspector Bharvad took me out in a vehicle and said, as he took out his revolver, “You bastard, run! We don’t want to investigate you people. Run!” He later took me to the police station and I was tortured. They abused Muslims and kept on torturing me. I knew that I could not take it anymore and I gave in. I said whatever they told me to. They made me say that I had planted the bombs. When I met Police Inspector Tarun Barot, I told him I couldn’t take the pain. I said I would kill myself. Barot told me, “Don’t worry, I have spoken to Ashish Bhatia. We will make you a witness in the case.” I told them the truth so they would free the innocents, but they made a false statement from what I said. They warned me against speakingout and told me that they could implicate me and that there was scope for supplementary chargesheets. I am speaking out now because I am disgusted, because innocent God-fearing men are in jail.

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‘The police tortured me. They undressed me and kept me in an 180 degree position. I could not take the pain so I did what they told me. They forcefully made me name those they have arrested,’ he says

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Q: How can you be so sure that the others were not involved?

A: It was all done secretly. We were told strictly to keep away from SIMI men like Arif, Sajid and the rest. If Mufti Abu Bashar and the others knew about it wouldn’t they have spoken to us about it? Only Subhan, Qayamuddin, Alamzeb and I knew about the plot.

Q: What about Abu Bashar?

A: Subhan brought Abu Basher into the group in Ahmedabad only for his knowledge of Arabic and the hadees. They said Abu Bashar had asked us to wage jihad, which is absolutely false. Subhan categorically asked us to keep our mouths shut in front of Abu Bashar because he was quite educated and was a God-fearing man. Subhan and Qayamuddin were always on the run. They kept saying that they need people to help carry out attacks.

Q: Did the Gujarat Police ever lure you?

A: They keep telling me, “Listen to us. You are a state witness. We will take care of you. Just don’t talk about this outside.”

Q: When was the last time you met Subhan Qureishi?

A: Around 30 days before the blasts.

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‘Qayamuddin showed me places like Naroda (one of the worst hit during the Gujarat 2002 riots) and said that these were the places where we needed to plant bombs,’ says the police’s star witness

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Unknown to the police, Witness has given us a full account in which he also damns himself. We also spoke to police officers without letting them know that we had had a long meeting with their star witness. The police maintain that they have a strong case. Says Joint Commissioner of Police Abhay Chudasama who is in charge of the case, “Even a child would know how important a witness would be in this case. And we do believe that whatever statements we have got from them and from the accused corroborate the evidence and will be enough to strengthen our case and nail the accused”.

When asked specifically why the alleged mastermind in the case would keep changing and asked about Abu Bashar Siddiqui, Sajid Mansuri and Yunus Mansuri (whose involvement in the case Witness has denied), Chudasama maintained that they were the key conspirators. While Chudasama was not as forthcoming when it came to the status of the witnesses, Ashish Bhatia, IG, Law and Order, who was the Joint Commissioner of Police in charge of the investigations maintained that some people who had backed out of committing the blasts were made witnesses and that their confessions would be crucial. When asked if the statements were voluntary, Bhatia said that all the statements were voluntary and in case the witnesses retracted their statements — even though they were recorded before a magistrate and therefore couldn’t be retracted —the Police would have the right to file a case against them. When asked if the witnesses had been tortured, both Chudasama and Bhatia replied that the matter was sub judice.

One year into the blasts, the trial is still to begin. Perhaps in the case of the Ahmedabad blasts there may not be no such thing called justice.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Thank you Lydia Polgreen for being so honest and impartial Thank you Souad Mekhennet for being so brave Most importantly, thank you New York Times for exposing the real face of Indian terrorists!

2 Killings Stoke Kashmiri Rage at Indian Force:

By Lydia Polgreen

Shopian, Kashmir, Saturday, August 15, 2009: On a sunny late spring afternoon, Asiya and Nilofer Jan left home to tend to their family’s apple orchard. Along the way they passed a gantlet of police camps wreathed in razor wire as they crossed the bridge over the ankle-deep Rambi River.

Nilofar Jan's husband, Shakeel Ahmad Ahanger, left, with Nilofar's father. The two women vanished on May 29. Four officers are accused of a cover-up in the case.

Little more than 12 hours later their battered bodies were found in the stream. Asiya, a 17-year-old high school student, had been badly beaten. Blood streamed from her nose and a sharp gash in her forehead. She and her 22-year-old sister-in-law, Nilofer, had been gang raped before their deaths.

The crime, and allegations of a bungled attempt by the local police to cover it up, set off months of sporadic street protests here in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. It is now the focal point for seemingly bottomless Kashmiri rage at the continuing presence of roughly 500,000 Indian security forces. The forces remain, though the violence by separatist militants whom they came here to fight in the past few years has ebbed to its lowest point in two decades.

A sister of Asiya Jan, a 17-year-old high school student who was also killed, holding Asiya's high school uniform. The case of Asiya and Nilofar is only the latest abuse to strike a chord with Kashmiris, who say it is emblematic of the problems of what amounts to a full-scale occupation.

“India says Kashmir is a free part of a free country,” said Majid Khan, a 20-year-old unemployed man who has joined the stone-throwing mobs. “If that is so, why are we being brutalized? Why are women gang raped?”

A sister of Nilofar Jan, with Nilofar's son, Suzain. Nilofar, 22, and her sister-in-law Asiya Jan, 17, were found dead this spring. They had been gang raped before their deaths.

India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir, and the Himalayan border region remains at the heart of the 62-year rivalry between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Settling the Kashmir dispute is crucial to unlocking the region’s tensions, something the United States hopes will eliminate Pakistan’s shadowy support for militant groups and allow its army to shift attention toward fighting Taliban militants.

Despite Kashmiri rage and the damage to India’s image, the Indian government has bridled at any outside pressure to negotiate a solution, let alone reduce its force level here. Caught in the middle are Kashmir’s 10 million people. The case of Asiya and Nilofer is only the latest abuse to strike a chord with Kashmiris, who say it is emblematic of the problems of what amounts to a full-scale occupation.

Kashmir has its own police force, but it works in close tandem with the Indian forces here and is seen by many as virtually indistinguishable from them. Four Kashmiri officers are suspected of trying to cover up the crime.

Kashmiri activists and human rights groups say that rapes by men in uniform, extrajudicial killings and a lack of redress are endemic, not least because security forces are largely shielded from prosecution by laws put in place when Indian troops were battling a once-potent insurgency here. Both local and national security forces here operate with impunity, they say.

The question for India, Kashmiris say, is whether the huge security presence is doing more harm than good.

“Maybe at some point in time when the militants were in the thousands it made sense to have so many soldiers here,” said Mehbooba Mufti, leader of a major opposition party here. “But at this point they are not helping in any way. Their mere presence has become a source of friction.”

Indian government officials point to statistics showing a decline in infiltration from Pakistan as proof that their tough methods have worked.

According to the government, 557 civilians died in 2005 in what the government calls “terrorist” violence in Jammu and Kashmir, which is India’s full name for the area. By 2008 that number had plummeted to 91. The number of militants killed has fallen by nearly two-thirds, while the deaths of security personnel in the region have been more than halved. Where tens of thousands of armed men once roamed, government officials now estimate there are as few as 500.

Analysts say that other events have also played a role in reducing militancy and infiltration. Secret talks between India and Pakistan over Kashmir made progress but broke down in 2007, when Pakistan’s president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, began losing his grip on power.

In addition, after two decades of militant separatism, in December 2008 voters ignored separatist calls for a boycott and cast ballots in huge numbers in state assembly elections. It was a hopeful sign that Kashmiris believed they could influence their destiny by peaceful means.

The election brought Omar Abdullah, the scion of Kashmir’s most famous political family, to power as chief minister of the state. He promised to roll back the laws that shielded Indian security forces in Kashmir from oversight, and to put Kashmir’s police force, rather than federal police and troops, at the forefront of securing the region. But that has not happened, and the details of the Shopian killings have fed the darkest and most personal fears of Kashmiris as the investigation into the deaths has stalled.

“Who does not see their wife in Nilofer, their daughter in Asiya?” said Abdul Rashid Dalal, who lives in Shopian.

The killings touched off sporadic protests in Shopian.

By 9:30 PM he was frantic. He went to the police station, and along with several officers scoured their route, including the shallow bed of the Rambi River. The police called off the search at 2:30 AM, urging Mr. Ahanger to return at daybreak. After his dawn prayers, he went back to the bridge with police officials.

“Look, there is your wife,” the local police chief said to Mr. Ahanger, pointing at a body lying prone on some rocks in a dry patch in the middle of the stream.

Signs in Shopian calling for the killers of Asiya and Nilofar Jan to be brought to justice. The crime is now the focal point for seemingly bottomless Kashmiri rage at the continuing presence of roughly 500,000 Indian security forces in the area.

The stream where the bodies of the victims were found. The authorities initially said that the women drowned.

He rushed to her, but she was dead. Her dress had been hiked up, exposing her midriff. Her body was bruised. “I knew immediately something very bad had happened to her,” Mr. Ahanger said. His sister was found a mile downstream. Their bodies were taken for autopsies, but the cause of death seemed clear to residents who have longed lived in the shadow of the security forces.

“Two girls disappear next to an armed camp,” said Abdul Hamid Deva, a member of a committee of elders set up in response to the killings. “Their bodies then mysteriously appear in a river next to the camp. It does not take much imagination to know what is likely to have happened.”

Men at the grave of Nilofar Jan, including her father, squatting. The crime, and allegations of a bungled attempt by the local police to cover it up, set off months of sporadic street protests.

Town residents gathered at the hospital for the autopsy results. Initially a doctor said the women drowned. But the crowd rejected the conclusion; the stream was barely ankle deep. Residents pelted the hospital with stones. A second team of doctors was called in. They confirmed that the women had been raped.

“What was done to these women even animals could not have done,” the gynecologist who examined the women told the crowd, weeping as she spoke, according to witnesses.

Two men who had been at a shop near the bridge would later tell investigators they saw a police truck parked on the bridge and heard women crying for help.

Initially, the chief minister, Mr. Abdullah, also told reporters that the women had drowned. Later security officials said that advisers had misinformed him. A few days later he acknowledged that the women had come to harm and appointed a commission to investigate. But investigators say that crucial evidence has been lost and that they are no closer to finding the culprits despite the arrest of four local police officers on suspicion of a cover-up.

Kuldeep Khoda, the director general of Kashmir’s police force, admitted that his forces had made mistakes. “There is a prima facie feeling there was destruction of evidence, whether deliberate or inadvertent,” Mr. Khoda said. “The investigation is going on and the results of that investigation will come.”

Indian government officials say that the security forces here are needed to head off more insurgent violence or a Pakistani invasion. “If there would not be a war that is fought by external forces, our soldiers would not be there,” said a senior Indian intelligence official, referring to groups in Pakistan.

But residents of Shopian say the security forces are the only threat. “The only thing I can do now is hope justice will be done,” said Mr. Ahanger, Nilofer’s husband, who is struggling to care for his 2-year-old son, Suzain. “Nobody is safe in Kashmir — even a child, an elderly man, a young girl. Nobody is safe.”

Nilofer and Asiya Jan had walked to the orchard around 3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 29. When Shakeel Ahmad Ahanger, Nilofer’s husband, came home at 7:30 p.m., the two had not yet returned. He went to search for them but found no trace.

________________________________________

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from New Delhi.

Due to a transcription error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the 22-year-old woman who, along with her sister, was raped and murdered in Kashmir. She is Nilofar, not Nilofa.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Srinagar, India, Friday, August 21, 2009: Rights workers have discovered several unmarked graves containing about 1,500 unidentified bodies in Indian Kashmir, a prominent rights group said Thursday, alleging that some of corpses could be those of innocent people killed by government forces.

Researchers from the Association of Parents of Disappeared People say at least eight of the graves held more than one body.

An Indian official said the bodies are probably those of militants killed over the past 20 years in fighting for control of the Himalayan region. Separatist groups there are fighting for the Indian-controlled portion's independence from predominantly Hindu India or its merger with mostly Muslim Pakistan.

More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the uprising and the subsequent Indian crackdown.

Human rights workers have complained for years that innocent people have disappeared or been killed by government forces in staged gun battles, and suspected rebels have been arrested and never heard from again.

Rights groups say there have been an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 disappearances since the anti-India rebellion began in 1989.

The government says most of the people who disappeared are Kashmiri youths who crossed into neighboring Pakistan for weapons training.

The state government on Monday said 3,429 people have disappeared from their homes while 110 others disappeared from the custody of government forces in the past two decades.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, a region divided between India and Pakistan, but claimed by both.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Ahmedabad, India, Saturday, October 03, 2009: The tableau was as improbable as it was grisly. The bullet-riddled bodies of four Muslims lay neatly lined up in the middle of a road. One of the dead cradled a machine gun. Bomb-making chemicals and a suitcase full of cash sat in the trunk of their car. Intelligence reports had identified the four as terrorism suspects.

Tensions between Hindus and Muslims plague Ahmedabad

It was a tidy crime scene with a story to match: four Islamic extremists who planned to assassinate the powerful chief minister of India’s richest state stopped cold by a fearless band of policemen early on the morning of June 15, 2004. The officers were hailed as heroes.

But the story was too good to be true, according to a recently released magistrate’s report. The supposed militants included a 19-year-old college student, a woman named Ishrat Jehan, who had no evident links to terrorist groups, the magistrate wrote.

The forensic evidence showed that the four had not died in a shootout but were shot at point-blank range, much earlier than the police had said. None of the four had actually fired a gun. They had been killed, the magistrate declared, in cold blood.

The sensational case has fed a heated national debate about the longstanding Indian police practice of killing suspects. Known euphemistically as “encounter killings,” such extrajudicial executions have been a tolerated and even celebrated method of dealing swiftly with crime in a country with a notoriously slow and sometimes corrupt judiciary. An officer in such cases invariably “encounters” a suspect and kills him, supposedly in self-defense.

In cities like Mumbai, which was for decades gripped by violent organized crime syndicates, officers who killed notorious gangland figures were often seen as dark folk heroes, selflessly carrying out the messy business of meting out justice. These officers, known as encounter specialists, became celebrities, even boasting about the number of gangsters they had killed.

But Indians have become increasingly wary of police officers crusading as judge, jury and executioner. Since 2006, 346 people have been killed in what seem to have been extrajudicial police killings, according to the National Human Rights Commission.

In many of these killings, investigations have found, the motive was not vigilante justice. The police often staged such killings for personal gain: bumping off a rival of a powerful politician in the hopes of a big promotion; killing a crime boss at the behest of one of his rivals; settling scores between businessmen.

Here in the state of Gujarat, the grim practice took on an even more sinister form. According to court documents, lawyers, human rights activists and the families of the victims, police officers seeking the favor of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, began killing small-time Muslim criminals and framing them as big-time terrorists bent on mass murder. No evidence has been offered to show that Mr. Modi encouraged such killings.

Riots in Gujarat killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, in the aftermath of an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims that killed 59 people in 2002. Mr. Modi, a prominent member of the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has long been accused of fueling the anti-Muslim violence with inflammatory remarks.

Tensions between Hindus and Muslims here are high. The officers who carried out the killings hoped to win promotions and other favors from lawmakers, according to court documents and human rights workers here.

In Gujarat, the team of officers suspected of carrying out these killings usually chose their victims carefully. In all five cases pending in the courts so far, the main targets had shady pasts confirmed by an arrest or conviction, usually for a petty crime. Most were Muslims.

But in the killing of Ms. Jehan that formula went awry. She hardly fit the usual profile of encounter victims. She was a full-time college student who also worked to provide for her widowed mother and six siblings.

According to her family, she was on a trip with her employer to help him set up his marketing business. On June 15, she was shot, according to the police, along with her accomplices as they tried to evade capture.

But the Gujarat magistrate’s report shredded that claim. The food in the victims’ stomachs proved that they had been killed much earlier, the report said. Their wounds were consistent with point-blank shootings. Their hands showed no trace of gunpowder residue. The police had planted weapons on the victims and staged the crime scene.

Gujarat government officials dispute the magistrate’s report, and Gujarat’s High Court has stopped the authorities from arresting the officers it named as the court conducts an inquiry.

Jay Narayan Vyas, a spokesman for the state government, said that the four people killed had been identified by the central government as terrorism suspects. A government intelligence report said that the four were possible terrorism suspects, but the central government has said that these were merely suspicions and could not justify the killings. Mr. Vyas said that the magistrate had overstepped his authority. He dismissed the findings as “false propaganda” from political opponents who wished to discredit Gujarat’s leaders.

Her mother, Shamima Kausar, rejects the officers’ account

Lawyers had known for years that something strange was happening in the Gujarat police force and that the killings of terrorism suspects were dubious, said Mukul Sinha, a lawyer for the relatives of several victims. But hardly anyone thought the killers would be brought to justice.

Then in 2005, the brother of one victim — a small-time bandit named Sohrabuddin Sheikh — sent a letter to India’s Supreme Court demanding an inquiry into the death of Mr. Sheikh, who had been killed by the police and branded a terrorist and who, like the four killed in June 2004, had been accused of planning to kill the chief minister of Gujarat.

Under Indian law any citizen can petition the country’s highest court directly, and the Supreme Court demanded an investigation. In 2007, Gujarat’s government acknowledged that the killing did not happen as the police had claimed and that the police had also killed Mr. Sheikh’s wife to cover up the crime.

The revelation opened the floodgates. “People realized that something can be done, that it is not impossible to get justice in Gujarat,” Mr. Sinha said.

After the officers who made up the elite squad that had carried out these encounters were arrested in the death of Mr. Sheikh, the killings stopped.

“All of a sudden the terrorists have stopped coming to kill Modi,” Mr. Sinha said.

But families of the victims are still waiting for justice.

Ms. Jehan’s mother, Shamima Kausar, said that the charge that her daughter was a terrorist was ludicrous. “She was just a college girl,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “She was my right hand. I am lost without her.”

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Karachi, Thursday, October 08, 2009: Indian government has bestowed upon Pakistan another gift in terms of death of a Pakistani who was tortured to death in Indian custody while his family has asked government for help get back his dead body.

Javaid (41), resident of Malir, Karachi was arrested in India two years ago while his daughter had been praying for his release for two years.

Javaid would be tortured in Raj Kot jail in Indian province Gujrat and was out of contact from his family in Pakistan while his only source of communication with family members was through his relatives living in India.

He died when he was being physically abused amid Tuesday-Wednesday night while Indian officials remained failed to prove him guilty of any crime until he was killed.

Now, his family members, relatives, and friends have strongly asked government of Pakistan to play its role in getting released the dead body of Javaid.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Lahore, Thursday, October 22, 2009: The body of a Pakistani, died in Indian jail, has arrived in Lahore through Wagah Border, Aaj News reported on Thursday.

According to the channel, BSF handed over the body of Muhammad Javed, 37, to Pak Rangers officials.

Deceased Muhammad Javed, resident of Karachi went to India through Mona Bao in February 2008 to attend the marriage ceremony of his relative. Before coming back to the country, Indian police arrested him on ground of alleged fake visa and police encounter and sent him to Gujarat jail, where he died from torture.

The channel quoted Shahid, brother of the deceased as saying that body of Muhammad Javed had decomposed owing to keeping it under open sky for ten days.

What a tragedy! Where can the Muslims of the subcontinent go? If we go to India, we may get arrested and tortured to death. Obviously, we can’t stay in Pakistan either since ‘Creation of Pakistan was the worst mistake in the history of human race,’ according to Altaf sahib Bhai walay!

Oh, another brilliant idea! Why don’t we just remove the Mafioso Altaf and then the ‘cult’ can continue its ‘ethnic cleansing’ practices unhindered and keep collecting taxes; that essentially mean 'a state within a state.' No need to try to create an ‘extremism/terrorism’ free society by going main-stream.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

New Delhi, Monday, November 23, 2009: BJP leader Vinay Katiyar, an accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case, today said the day the structure was brought down by Karsevaks was the "happiest day" of his life.

"If you ask me four times, I will repeat four times that it was the happiest day of my life," he said.

When it was pointed out that senior BJP leader L K Advani had said December 6, 1992 was the saddest day of his life, Katiyar said "that is his individual opinion".

He also maintained that there was "no planning" involved in the demolition.

BJP MP Yogi Adityanath said, "We are proud of demolition of Babri structure. It was not a Masjid but a disputed structure at Ayodhya."

"There will be a Ram temple in Ayodhya and we will built it," he said outside Parliament.

New Delhi, Monday, November 23, 2009: Hindu nationalist lawmakers in India caused uproar in parliament on Monday after accusations they had orchestrated the razing of a mosque that led to bloody religious riots 17 years ago.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members repeatedly shouted down the speaker over newspaper claims that an official inquiry into the Babri Mosque's demolition "indicted" the party's leaders.

The Indian Express newspaper also claimed the probe, which will be published shortly, concluded that the 1992 attack on the Muslim shrine by hordes of Hindu zealots was "meticulously planned."

Home Minister P. Chidambaram said that the report should not be judged until it was published finally later in the current parliamentary session.

"There is only one copy of the Liberhan Commission report with the home ministry and it is in safe custody and no one has spoken to any journalist about it," he said, as opposition protests forced the house to adjourn.

The Express said the probe "indicted" Atal Behari Vajpayee - a former BJP prime minister who is widely respected as a moderate Hindu nationalist - and L K Advani, the current hardline leader who was then deputy premier.

Advani travelled across India in 1990 to draw support for his campaign to install a temple on the site of the Babri mosque in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Ayodhya in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

On Monday Advani accused India's ruling Congress party of deliberately leaking the inquiry's conclusions and protested his innocence.

"I take strong objection as to how the government has suddenly leaked the report," he told parliament, describing the mosque's destruction as "the saddest moment of my life."

Congress party spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi accused BJP leaders of clapping with joy as they watched Hindu rioters tear down the mosque "and then shedding crocodile tears about sadness."

Devout Hindus believe the mosque was built on the ruins of a temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu warrior Lord Ram.

The mosque's demolition triggered some of the worst Hindu-Muslim violence since the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, with more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, left dead.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

New Delhi, Tuesday, November 24, 2009: Pandemonium erupted in the Indian Parliament Tuesday as the government unveiled key findings of an inquiry into the controversial 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque.

Home Minister P Chidambaram presented the 900-page report in the lower house of Parliament at noon among scuffles and yelling between opposition and government members of Parliament.

The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party accused the governing United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress party, of selectively leaking the report, elements of which appeared in the Indian press earlier this week. The report was authored by a commission chaired by retired high court judge M S Liberhan.

The report criticized the role of 68 people including former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani, current leader of the BJP, over the demolition of the structure.

A BJP spokesman couldn't be reached for immediate comment. Another BJP official said neither Mr Vajpayee nor Mr Advani was available for comment.

"The report is ridiculous," said former BJP leader Kalyan Singh in a television press conference. "For me, December 6 is a day of national pride. I do not regret the demolition."

Mr Singh, who was among those criticized in the report, was the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, which neighbors New Delhi, during the mosque demolition by a Hindu mob in the town of Ayodhya on Dec. 6, 1992. The rioters pulled down the mosque, claiming the site was apt for the construction of a temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu god, Ram.

The destruction of the mosque was one of the most discordant events ever between Hindus and Muslims in India and led to Hindu-Muslim riots across the country in which more than 2,000 people were killed.

The commission's report was submitted to the government in June this year but its contents were not made public. It took 17 years to complete the work.

A supplemental report, known as the Action Taken Report, did not recommend punitive action against anyone for the demolition of the mosque but called for a new law to punish people using religion for political ends, according to government officials.

"Each and every recommendation has been accepted and noted; the government is bound to take positive action" regarding the report's recommendations, said Indian law minister Veerappa Moily in Parliament Tuesday.

New Delhi, Tuesday, November 24, 2009: A government investigation released Tuesday reportedly implicated dozens of Hindu nationalist politicians - including a former prime minister - in the 1992 demolition of a mosque that sparked deadly communal riots.

The attack by Hindu mobs on the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, 350 miles (550 kilometers) east of New Delhi, sparked nationwide riots that killed 2,000 people in the largest explosion of Hindu-Muslim tension in the country in decades.

Hindu nationalist leaders claim the mosque was built by Mogul rulers at the site of a Hindu temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.

The violence was a black mark on India's secular tradition and exposed simmering religious tensions in the country.

A copy of the report, released by NDTV television, listed 68 Hindu nationalist politicians, bureaucrats and other officials as being culpable in the violence. Among those: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who later became prime minister.

The government gave parliament the long-delayed report into the mosque's destruction on Tuesday. But with many lawmakers from nationalist opposition parties protesting the investigation, officials appeared to pull back from plans to make the nearly 1,000 page document publicly available.

The report, clogged in the morass of Indian bureaucracy, has taken so long to produce that many of those accused of stoking the violence have since died.

New Delhi, Tuesday, November 24, 2009: The Liberhan Commission report into the demolition of Babri mosque has held the "single-minded" agenda of RSS and VHP responsible for turning common people into a frenzied mob leading to the events of December 6, 1992.

The four-volume report of over 1,000 pages and tabled in Parliament today has also blamed "a rank of leaders" from BJP, RSS, VHP, Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal who saw the Ayodhya issue as a road to their success and has termed these people as "executioners wielding the sword handed to them by the ideologues".

These leaders were "neither guided by any ideology nor imbued with any dogma nor restrained by any moral trepidation," the report said.

Observing that the events of and leading up to December 6 were tainted by a "joint conspiratorial enterprise", the report said a handful of "malevolent leaders unabashedly invoked the name of the paragon of tolerance to turn peaceful communities into intolerant hordes.

"The single-minded agenda of the RSS and the VHP; and the extremely patient and focused manner in which the handful of ideologues and theologians manipulated the common masses and turned them into a frenzied mob, capable of acts of the greatest depravity agenda, is unparallelled in recent times."

The Commission said it was the common man who demolished the three-domed structure as he "had no reason to fear or hate the masonry structure or the neighbour with whom he and his family had lived in peace till the moment that his better sense was drowned in the cacophony of religious righteousness and the zealot's rhetoric".

New Delhi, Tuesday, November 24, 2009: The Liberhan Commission's report on the Babri Masjid demolition has blamed former Prime Minister and BJP leader A B Vajpayee for leading the country to the brink of communal discord while the Action Taken Report (ATR) has called for a law against politicians misusing religion.

Both the Liberhan report and the ATR were tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.

Among the others held culpable for the events leading to the mosque's demolition are Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, VHP leaders Ashok Singhal and Acharya Giriraj Kishore, BJP leader B P Singhal, Govindacharya and former RSS chief K S Sudarshan.

Also named in the report are L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, the late Pramod Mahajan, Praveen Togadia, Shankersinh Vaghela, Uma Bharti and Vinay Katiyar.

The BJP has expressed shock at Vajpayee being among those named by the commission.

The ATR promises tough measures to prevent a repeat of incidents like the Babri Masjid demolition. It calls for establishing a criminal justice commission and special investigative squads.

The ATR says that those holding public or other offices of profit should not be allowed to head religious bodies. Separate laws are needed to provide exemplary punishment for those misusing religion and caste for political gains.

The ATR also promises regional tribunals and lower courts for ensuring swift prosecution of those accused of religious and caste crimes. The tribunals will also ensure effective implementation of existing legislations.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

New Delhi, Thursday, November 26, 2009: After 17 years, several hundred testimonies, and many missed deadlines, an inquiry into one of modern India’s darkest episodes, the destruction of a mosque by Hindu fanatics, this week at last published its findings. It prompted riotous scenes in parliament and a media whirl. The report, on the demolition in December 1992 of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, concluded that senior leaders of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including the party’s present leader, Lal Krishna Advani, were complicit in the vandalism.

The demolition sparked violence across India, in which some 2,000 people died. It has stained Indian politics ever since. For Hindu activists, the destruction was merely the first act, and less important than the still unwritten sequel, in which a glorious temple would be built to Ram, a Hindu god-king. Invading Muslims in the 16th century had allegedly plonked the mosque on Ram’s birthplace. A more recent communal disaster, a pogrom in the state of Gujarat in 2002, in which more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, are believed to have been killed, could also be traced back to Ayodhya. It started with a fire, contentiously blamed on Muslim arsonists, on a train carrying Hindu activists back from agitating there.

That the BJP was involved in the demolition of the Babri Masjid was never in doubt. It followed a noisy and divisive campaign by Mr Advani for a Ram temple on the site. After whipping up his followers, he and several other senior BJP leaders looked on as the mosque was razed with pickaxes and bare hands.

This was a watershed in modern Indian history, exacerbating tensions between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority. It propelled the BJP, which until Mr Advani’s campaign had been on the fringe of Indian politics, into a mainstream party. In 1998 a BJP-led coalition won a general election, thanks in part to the party’s continued promotion of an ideology known as Hindutva, literally “Hinduness”, that asserts Hindu rights.

(My comments: What a stunt! If MQM can fight for the rights of those with the highest standard of living + literacy rate in Pakistan then I guess BJP too can fight for the rights of Hindus who are about 80% of the population of India and control power, media, money, etc.)

Nearly two decades on, that ideology appears to have lost much of its vote-winning power. In a general election this spring, the BJP took a drubbing. It now controls only 116 seats in the 543-member parliament. Political scientists ascribed the victory of the Congress party partly to its wresting of votes from the BJP’s core supporters: Upper-Caste and middle-class Indians once drawn to political Hinduism.

The report by M S Liberhan, a judge, debunks the BJP’s long-held claim that the mosque was spontaneously torn down by Hindu zealots. Especially damaging is its description of Atal Behari Vajpayee, a former prime minister long admired across party lines for his moderate views and gentle wit, as a “pseudo-moderate”. Mr Vajpayee, like Mr Advani, was found to have been aware of the impending demolition and to have done little to stop it.

For the BJP, grappling with an ideological crisis compounded by in-fighting, the report comes at a bad time. This has fuelled allegations that prepublication leaks of parts of it were politically motivated. The government has denied this.

Muslim leaders have called on the government to punish those castigated in the report. But neither the report itself nor the government statement that followed its publication hint at this. Some reckon the government is unlikely to prosecute any politicians over the Babri Masjid incident, lest the Hindu right make martyrs of them.

Impunity has also been enjoyed by the perpetrators of both the Gujarat pogrom and of the massacre of more than 3,000 Sikhs in 1984. The government has, however, said it will follow Mr Liberhan’s suggestion of drafting a law to punish those who manipulate religion for political ends. Frictions between Hindus and religious minorities have often rallied more extreme Hindu groups aligned with the BJP. Last year, after the party came to power in Karnataka, in the south, the state suffered a rash of anti-Christian violence.

In Ayodhya itself the priest of the makeshift Hindu temple built where the mosque once stood rues the day it was ever destroyed. Ever since the Babri Masjid’s three majestic domes fell, Ram’s birthplace has been exposed to the sun and the rain, complains the softly spoken, saffron-robed Satyendra Das as he sits near his temple reading the “Bhagavad Gita”, a Hindu text. “In the mosque Ram was safe”, he adds. “Those Hindu activists did all this for political gains. We had no hassles with our Muslim brothers.”

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

In this April 13, 2007 file photo, Maoist rebels exercise at a temporary base in the Abujh Marh forests, in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh. Maoist rebels killed at least 80 paramilitary soldiers in attacks Tuesday April 6, 2010, in eastern India, a senior police official said, the most casualties since government forces launched an offensive against the insurgents last year. AP

The attack took place in Chhattisgarh's Mukrana forests in Dantewada district. Sources said the Maoists took the CRPF troopers by surprise after they went as reinforcements for their colleagues during an encounter.

In a massive jolt to the Operation Green Hunt launched by the government against Naxalites, around eighty CRPF personnel were killed in an ambush launched by the Maoists in the forests of Chhattisgarh.

The attack took place in Chhattisgarh's Mukrana forests in Dantewada district. Sources said the Maoists took the CRPF troopers by surprise after they went as reinforcements for their colleagues during an encounter.

Presently, around about 150 jawans are missing and the battle is still going on. DGP CRPF has also reached the affected place to check out the current scenario.

Two days ago, 11 jawas were killed in Orissa in Koraput distt. by the Naxalites.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

"The article by Maidhc Ó Cathail is factual and on the dot. He correctly points out Pakistan's weakness and inability at projecting its point of view in the American media. Fareed Zakaria is biased against Pakistan, coming as he does from the minority Muslim community from Hyderabad in India and who seems to be trying to please Hindu rulers back home. His writings have frequently depicted this bias.

"He is also correct in pointing out the dubious character and background of Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US. His Jewish connections are informative and explain his actions such as his role in Kerry Lugar Bill issue. I met Haqqani in 1985 in Islamabad when he was a no-body and my personal impression of him was that of a person without credibility. Later, I saw him serving in the governments of two Pakistani political parties fiercely opposed to each other, coming one after the other, and then go on to write the controversial book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military that Maidhc Ó Cathail quotes, after leaving Pakistan for fear of reprisals. I enjoyed Ó Cathail's conclusion that:

'In short, if Tel Aviv had handpicked Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, they could hardly have found a more suitable candidate than Haqqani.'

"Maidhc Ó Cathail's observations about Indo-Israeli connection and their joint anti-Pakistan operations in Afghanistan are absolutely correct. He seems to have done his research well and with an open mind.

"I consider his article to be a correct depiction of intentions and activities of all the players: US, India, Israel and the American media in the wars imposed on Afghanistan and Pakistan."

______________________________

In its bitter rivalry with India, Pakistan is at a fatal disadvantage. Unlike its South Asian neighbour, Islamabad lacks an ally with considerable influence over American mainstream media.

The latest example of US media complicity with the Indo-Israeli alliance came in the aftermath of the much-hyped Times Square “car-bomb” incident. Typical of the media orgy of Pakistan-bashing that followed the discovery of an SUV packed with 250 pounds of non-explosive fertilizer was a piece written by Newsweek’s Indian-born editor, Fareed Zakaria, in which he brands Pakistan as “a terrorist hothouse.”

“For a wannabe terrorist shopping for help, Pakistan is a supermarket,” writes Zakaria. “There are dozens of jihadi organizations: Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al Qaeda, Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani’s network, Tehrik-e-Taliban, and the list goes on. Some of the major ones, like the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, operate openly via front groups throughout the country. But none seem to have any difficulty getting money and weapons.”

Zakaria is in no doubt about who’s to blame.

“From its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish,” claims the CNN pundit.

To back up his assertions, Zakaria cites no less an authority that Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. In Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, which Zakaria considers a “brilliant history,” Husain Haqqani claims that support for jihad has been “a consistent policy of the state.”

Case closed for the prosecution? Perhaps not.

The Pakistani diplomat’s credibility as an objective critic of jihadism is undermined somewhat by his intimate ties to the Israel-centric neoconservative network. A former fellow at the Likudnik Hudson Institute, Haqqani co-chaired Hudson’s Project on Islam and Democracy. Its director, Hillel Fradkin, was a Project for a New American Century signatory to a 2002 letter to George W. Bush equating Yasser Arafat with Osama Bin Laden in an effort to convince the White House that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.”

Haqqani also collaborated with another neocon, Stephen Schwartz, on the Institute for Islamic Progress and Peace. A project of the notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, it is widely suspected to be an attempt to “divide and conquer” the American Muslim community. In short, if Tel Aviv had handpicked Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, they could hardly have found a more suitable candidate than Haqqani.

“Pakistani reality cannot be evaded,” he writes. “The jihadist domination seen in the Pakistani army and intelligence services (ISI) is visible everywhere South Asian Muslims congregate. It explains the reluctance of the Pakistani government to fulfill its commitment to fighting the Taliban. And it equally accounts for conspiracies like that foiled in Times Square.”

The one evading “Pakistani reality,” however, is Schwartz. If any government is to be held responsible for terrorism carried out by Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), it is not in Islamabad but in Tel Aviv or New Delhi.

As Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, revealed in a recent interview: “We have very little doubt that the Indians and the Israelis, that are all over Afghanistan with German passports pretending to be military contractors, are operating 17 camps along the Taliban regions training and arming terrorists.”

According to Duff, “The Pakistani Taliban is in close cooperation with, supplied, financed, armed and trained by Israel and India to attack Pakistan.”

Duff’s claims are based on a February 2010 fact-finding tour of Pakistan, where he was briefed by the highest levels of the country’s military and intelligence establishment, including Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, former director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Admiral Iftikhar Ahmed Sirohey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Mirza Aslam Beg, former Chief of Army Staff.

Fearful of offending their Israel-conscious paymasters in Washington, the Pakistani military and intelligence services have been forced into the humiliating position of leaking their side of the story through the Veterans Today website.

According to the ISI leak, the Times Square terror plot was a “false flag operation to implicate the Pakistani Taliban and then threaten and force Pakistan to ‘do more’ in North Waziristan.” This was followed by “a massive media disinformation war” to induce the belief that “all global terrorism is emerging from the Pakistani tribal pocket of North Waziristan, and that the ISI/army is either hands and gloves with the Taliban or not willing to do more.”

Clearly, Israel and India share a common geostrategic interest in the destabilization of the nuclear-armed Muslim nation. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated, “Our ties with India don’t have any limitation….”

Israel, however, has proven itself a rather dubious ally—as a growing number of Americans are beginning to realize. Perhaps one day policymakers in New Delhi will have a similar awakening. But for the time being, the media component of its alliance with Tel Aviv affords India a powerful weapon to wage surrogate warfare against Pakistan.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan Introduction by Shahid R. Siddiqi

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

According to the ISI leak, the Times Square terror plot was a “false flag operation to implicate the Pakistani Taliban and then threaten and force Pakistan to ‘do more’ in North Waziristan.” This was followed by “a massive media disinformation war” to induce the belief that “all global terrorism is emerging from the Pakistani tribal pocket of North Waziristan, and that the ISI/army is either hands and gloves with the Taliban or not willing to do more.”

I was quite surprised when they were all asking Pakistan to do more, especially when we have even used bombing runs by aircrafts on Waziristan, why than have people been saying do more !As Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, revealed in a recent interview: “We have very little doubt that the Indians and the Israelis, that are all over Afghanistan with German passports pretending to be military contractors, are operating 17 camps along the Taliban regions training and arming terrorists.”

No wonder they were all against the idea of the previous govt. of putting a radar in place for checking movement of people between Pakistan & Afghanistan, than the destruction of fenced boundary, hue & cry over mining the land ... why was it important to keep the boundaries unguarded between Pakistan & Afghanistan ! Why ? or what interest did it serve ?

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan and is claimed by both. — Photo by AFP Front Page

SRINAGAR: Indian troops fired on hundreds of demonstrators who tried to torch a paramilitary bunker in Kashmir on Sunday, killing one person and wounding at least five, police said. More were injured in subsequent clashes.

Hundreds of people took to the streets of Srinagar in an angry protest against the death of a 25-year-old who died a day earlier after being beaten by soldiers in a demonstration last week.

The protesters threw rocks at security forces and surrounded an armoured vehicle belonging to paramilitary soldiers, according to footage from AP Television News.

They later tried to light a bunker on fire, said Farooq Ahmed, a top police officer. A spokesman for the paramilitary force said they fired in self-defence.

''We exercised maximum restraint. Our soldiers opened fire only in self-defence after the protesters tried to torch the bunker,'' said Prabhakar Tripathi, spokesman for the Central Reserve Police Force.

One person was killed and at least five wounded, said Ahmed.

The demonstration swelled after the shots were fired, when hundreds more people poured into the streets, chanting ''We want freedom'' and ''Indian forces leave Kashmir.''

''The situation has been brought under control and restrictions on assembly of more than five people have been imposed in some parts of Srinagar,'' he said.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan and is claimed by both. Militant groups have been fighting since 1989 for the Himalayan region's independence from India or its merger with neighbouring Pakistan.

More than 68,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict.

Hakim Bey: Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head
Napoleon Bonaparte: The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!

Discontent more in held Kashmir than in AJK: surveyBy Amir Wasim Monday, 31 May, 2010

The survey reveals that 36 per cent people of the occupied Jammu and Kashmir and 24 per cent of AJK consider the Kashmir conflict itself as their main problem. — Photo by AFP World

ISLAMABAD: A recent survey has found a higher percentage of discontented people in occupied territory than in Azad Kashmir.

The survey titled ‘Kashmir: Paths to peace’ conducted by British academic Robert Bradnock and released by a UK-based think-tank shows that people living on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) consider “unemployment, government corruption and poor economic development” as their three top problems, but the number of discontented people is much higher in occupied Kashmir.

The survey was released by the Chatham House think-tank in London last week.

It says that for a very large majority of the population in both parts of Kashmir -- 81 per cent -- unemployment is the most significant problem faced by the people. However, 87 per cent people of occupied Kashmir see unemployment as the biggest problem as compared to 66 per cent in Azad Kashmir.

The findings show that 68 per cent people in occupied Jammu and Kashmir term government corruption a big problem whereas only 22 per cent in AJK consider it a problem for themselves.

Similarly, 45 per cent people in occupied Kashmir and 42 per cent in AJK consider less economic development a major problem.

About 43 per cent people of occupied Kashmir describe human rights abuse as one of their biggest problems as compared to 19 per cent in AJK.

The survey reveals that 36 per cent people of the occupied Jammu and Kashmir and 24 per cent of AJK consider the Kashmir conflict itself as their main problem.

The survey shows that Baramula, Srinagar and Anantnag districts in occupied Kashmir are the worst places as far as incidents of human rights abuses are concerned as 88 per cent, 87 per cent and 73 per cent people of the three districts, respectively, declared it their main problem.

In Azad Kashmir, 32 per cent in Bhimber and 31 per cent in Kotli termed human rights abuses as the biggest problem.

Dr Robert Wirsing, a US author on South Asian issues, said at the ceremony held at the time of the survey’s release that the water issue had not been covered by the study.

In Pakistan, rivers were drying up perhaps more because of climatic changes but also because of construction of dams and hydroelectric projects by India on the Jhelum and Chenab rivers.

Dr Wirsing said the water issue needed urgent attention because it might raise tension between the two countries.

During the survey carried out in October last year, about 3,800 people in seven districts of AJK and 11 districts of occupied Kashmir were interviewed.

Hakim Bey: Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head
Napoleon Bonaparte: The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!

New Delhi, Wednesday, July 21, 2010: State-owned banks in India have been accused of discriminating against the country's Muslim minority.

India's minorities watchdog has received a record number of complaints from Muslims who say they have been prevented from opening bank accounts.

India's Muslim community is among the poorest in the country.

Some bankers say it is not so much their religious background, but their economic status that makes it hard for Muslims to get banking facilities.

The National Commission of Minorities says that there has been a 100% increase in the number of complaints it has received over the past year from Muslims who say they are being prevented from opening accounts in state-run banks.

Reports say the worst case took place in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where some 90,000 Muslim students were unable to open accounts to deposit scholarship cheques given to them by the government.

Official reports frequently put Muslims at the bottom of India's social and economic ladder - even beneath than low-caste Hindus.

Their economic status means they are often excluded by private banks, which prefer more well-to-do clients.

Already a number of reports have suggested that India's Muslims fare poorly when it comes to getting access to quality education or employment opportunities.

This latest finding will add more pressure on a government which is seen as doing very little for the country's largest minority group.

Altaf Bhai, you listening? Why are you begging Indian Hindus to accept you back in India? India might be shining and progressing well for the 'Upper Caste Hindus' but what does that got to do with you? They may not even let you open a bank account there! Where as 'yahan par mazay hi mazay.' We are even letting you collect your own taxes; virtually creating a state within a state!

'Kis ko bewakoof bana rahay ho?' The community with the highest standard of living and highest literacy rate is fighting for its rights! Hopefully the community will learn one day that it was all about your personnel glory and gain. Karachi almost became 'Dubai of Pakistan' before you started your agitation but then as a country also we make similar mistakes. We tend to progress well for a while but then self-destruct by electing most corrupt and incompetent leaders on the planet!

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

It's India's poor who need British aid, not its military and business elites:

In tickling the vanity of Delhi's super-rich, David Cameron shuns the most principled area of the two countries' relationship

By Pankaj Mishra

Wednesday, July 28, 2010: This week David Cameron flew to India in a chartered plane, accompanied by six ministers, innumerable corporate chiefs, and even a few Olympic medallists. Cameron has vowed to forge a "new special relationship" with the world's second-fastest growing economy, which the Labour government, infatuated with the old special relationship, neglected to build. A foundation for this alliance was apparently laid today when BAE signed a £500m contract to supply 57 Hawk jet trainers to India's air force and navy.

India seeks urgently and expensively to modernise its military. No one in the British delegation will be pressing Indian flesh more eagerly this week than representatives of BAE and Rolls-Royce, who in India are vying for some of the world's biggest weapons contracts. The rest of the Indian scene is not so inviting (and Cameron is wise to refrain from invoking old colonial links, which would slight India's new amour-propre as much as it might gladden British hearts).

The foreign policies of the two countries remain at odds. While Britain sensibly advocates negotiations with the Taliban, India wants its own zone of influence in Afghanistan. India is much closer, politically and commercially, to the US than it is to Britain; the UK government's proposed immigration caps will further deter highly skilled Indians from contributing to the British economy. And British business people seeking fresh openings in India's tightly regulated finance, banking, insurance and retail sectors are likely to be disappointed.

Nevertheless, the coalition government, and its approving media chorus, seems intoxicated by its Rip-Van-Winklish discovery of "Shining India". The old Jewel in the Crown has suddenly mutated into the new El Dorado, and this widespread but unexamined fantasy is already helping the coalition government to dismantle the most principled aspect of Britain's relationship with India. Jo Johnson, the Conservative MP for Orpington, seemed to amplify a growing Tory consensus when, in the Financial Times, he described British aid to India as an "anachronism". Citing India's grand projects and superpower ambitions, Johnson claimed that the country is "no longer a natural aid recipient".

This is certainly a bold assertion. According to the latest measure of the United Nations Development Programme, which includes such indicators of deprivation as education and health, just eight Indian states have more poor people – 421 million – than the 28 poorest countries of Africa. In fact, undernutrition in India is twice as high as that in sub-Saharan Africa, with nearly half of India's 120 million children exposed to early death.

Survival is no less a challenge for many children in Gujarat, one of India's richest states. Poverty and inequality stubbornly persist across India despite spectacular GDP growth, proving the moral nullity of the trickle-down theory, memorably derided by John Kenneth Galbraith as the notion that "if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows".

A relatively tiny minority monopolises the oats in India, and now claims an exalted position for itself in the world. As innumerable urban "beautification" programmes reveal, these powerful Indians would ideally like their less well-off compatriots – like the woman from the Mumbai slum who was run over by a car in David Cameron's cavalcade in 2006 – to disappear from sight. To take their vanity projects, such as October's £1.5bn Commonwealth Games in Delhi or India's planned junket to the moon, as evidence of inclusive economic growth is to fall for the flimsiest of illusions.

India's political and business elites have not only failed to provide basic public services to the deprived majority; their preferred model of economic development actively victimises the poor, provoking India's conservative supreme court to marvel last week at how "every step that we take seems to give rise to insurgency and political extremism".

The court was ruling over the acquisition of land by a company that failed to compensate its tribal owners for 23 years. Business people and politicians in India have perpetrated many such blatant, and bigger, injustices in the name of development, forcing many dispossessed people to take up arms in the intensifying Maoist insurgency in central India. As the supreme court observed, development has become a "dreadful and hated word" to millions of Indians.

Dfid – Britain's international development department – has occasionally been complicit in the kind of economic growth that strangulates the poor while making the richest even richer. However, with all its flaws, it is still more conscientious than most of its western peers – especially US aid agencies, which blatantly funnel large portions of "aid" money to American "consultants" while advancing the interests of large American companies. Two-thirds of Dfid's outlay in India is spent on providing health and education services where almost none exist. There is of course ample scope for cutting down wasteful spending and reducing, if not altogether eliminating, corruption. But foreign aid is not an anachronism in a country whose more than 800 million people still live on less than $2 a day: a pitiable budget under assault by double-digit inflation.

It is surely no accident that Cameron's high-powered delegation could not find a place for Andrew Mitchell, the minister in charge of Dfid, which runs the largest single-country programme in India, accounting for nearly 30% of all foreign aid received by the country. Mitchell himself probably put his name on the no-fly-to-India list. "£250m of public money spent annually on nuclear-armed India could be scaled back," he said recently.

Jo Johnson, too, cites India's huge defence budget as evidence that the country can attend to its own development needs. But this defence outlay, which grew by an unprecedented 34% last year and is almost entirely exempt from parliamentary scrutiny or public debate, is an exclusive bonanza for India's alarmingly numerous corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and army officers (whom BAE, with its experience of Saudi Arabia, may be well placed to indulge). Delhi's opulent five-star hotels swarm with lobbyists for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Dassault and other arms companies. A recent rash of ill-suited and extravagant acquisitions by the Indian government prompted even Sunil Khilnani, a sober political scientist and author of The Idea of India, to warn of a nascent "military-industrial complex" in India.

This is particularly disturbing as the expensive new weapons are likely to be turned against people India claims as its own – and not just in the valley of Kashmir where an anti-India insurgency has consumed more than 80,000 lives, and where Indian security forces have shot dead 17 Muslim protesters, mostly teenagers, in just the past six weeks. The Indian government is also considering deploying the army and air force to suppress the growing Maoist rebellion.

Flying into this gathering storm, the British delegation seems to want little more than safe landing for its Hawk jets and other military hardware. Cameron will no doubt play to the Indian gallery by accusing Pakistan of terrorism while remaining silent about murder and torture in Kashmir. He will tickle the vanity of India's elite by supporting their claims to a permanent seat at the UN security council and other high tables. He may even relax visa rules for Indians. But none of this can compensate for the severing of Britain's old links with India's great mass of ordinary people – or the replacement of Dfid's lifelines to India's poorest with a "new special relationship" that at present promises to do little more than enliven the parties of Delhi's arms dealers.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Hindu-Muslim riots begin once again in IndiaPolice fired 16 rounds in air today when nearly 2,000 villagers of Bhilvan in Patan district pelted stones, leaving four cops injured, after family members of a murder victim entered the village in their protection.Four persons were today sentenced to life imprisonment by the district sessions court for the murder of one Ramesh Prajapati in July 2009, police said. After the sentence was pronounced, Prajapati's brother Chaman and his wife Shweta had come to Bhilvan under police protection to perform some religious ritual, they said. Around 2,000 irate villagers came out in open and began to hurl stones on police in which four of our men were injured, deputy Superintendent of police said. The district sessions court sentenced Sayed Yusuf Mohammad, Hamid Mothia, Irshad Sheikh and Umar Bhagat to life imprisonment for killing Prajapati, while acquitting one Umar Gulam Rasul for lack of evidence. Prajapati's family had left Bhilvan after his death last year and was living in Patan town.

More Pakistani prisoners keep loosing sanity and keep dying in Indian jails but Indian prisoners seem to keep gaining weight in Pakistani prisons!

People don't loose sanity simply because they got arrested. They must have been tortured. Their crime: They crossed the border by mistake!

GoP won’t do a thing about it! Isn’t it their job to protect the citizens of Pakistan?

3 Pakistani imprisoned in India died: Interior Ministry

Thursday, August 19, 2010: According to the Interior Ministry, three Pakistani imprisoned in Indian jails have died and their dead bodies are lying in Delhi hospital.

However the difficulty in identifying the deceased is obstructing the shifting of the dead bodies to Pakistan. According to a private TV channel, the Pakistani embassy in India was notified in writing by Indian authorities that three Pakistani citizens, namely Mukhtar son of Wali Dad, Munshia and Basheer Ahmad, erroneously crossed the border and were imprisoned in India.

Prior to their deaths, they had lost their mental balance and thus could not give complete details about their identity, the Indian officials said.

The dead bodies have been moved to a hospital in Delhi. According to Interior Ministry authorities, it is difficult to locate the relatives of the deceased by names only and the families could only be located after India provides them with complete details of the deceased prisoners.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Saturday, October 30, 2010: During the weekly Foreign Office briefing in Islamabad, spokesperson Abdul Basit said that India should formally inform Pakistan regarding the Samjhota Express probe. Pakistan has also demanded of Indian government to ask the court to expedite verdict on the case against Hindutva terrorists and bring them to early justice. This demand has come at the heels of a report of Indian English daily ‘India Today’ on Sunday making a reference to official admission by an Indian investigating agency that Samjhota Express and the Jamia Masjid Delhi were on the hit list of Hindutva terrorists who were also involved in attacks on Ajmer Sharif, Malegaon and Makkah Masjid in Hyderabad.

The Rajasthan Anti-Terrorism Squad’s 806-page charge sheet on the Ajmer blasts says the module behind these three targets had sinister plans to target the Samjhota Express and Jamia Masjid as well. However, the report stated that it was not clear though whether this terror cell could execute its plan. Over 60 Pakistanis died in the Samjhota Express blast on February 19, 2007, while earlier 13 people were wounded in blasts inside Jamia Masjid on April 14, 2006 – months after this module (according to the Rajasthan ATS) chose them as targets at a meeting chaired by Rashtriya Savak Sangh (RSS) leader Swami Asimanand in February 2006. The bombs used in the Samjhota Express are believed to have been assembled in Indore. But the suspected bomber, Sunil Joshi, was found mysteriously murdered in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh, on December 27, 2007. Anyhow, after 44 months of dilly-dallying, India has officially admitted that the Hindutva brigade of the extremist group Abhinav Bharat, of which Indian Army’s serving officer, Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit was an active member, was responsible for the bombings on board the Pakistan bound Samjhota Express. The report confirmed the complicity of the Hindu extremist group Abhinav Bharat, Indian Army officers of the ilk of Lieutenant Colonel Purohit, who actually supplied the explosive material, military-grade explosive RDX, and other Hindu radicals, who had plotted and executed the heinous crimes against humanity as part of their campaign of ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Purohit and retired army Major Samir Kulkarni had also helped train the alleged bombers. India has been officially denying any link of Hindu extremists with the mayhem, death and carnage resulting from the blasts and instead tried to shift the blame for the heinous crime to the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

In November 2008, when the Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) of Mumbai had arrested Lieutenant Colonel Purohit for his involvment in the bombings, the BJP had denounced the ATS as traitors. Bal Thackeray, the supremo of the Shiv Sena, a longtime ally of the BJP, had forthrightly accused the ATS of framing the Malegaon bombing accused. “What Pakistan was not able to do in the last 20 years,” declared Modi, “the Manmohan Singh government has achieved in just 20 days. They have succeeded in branding our soldiers as terrorists.” That is another story that Haimant Karkare, the head of the Mumbai ATS was assassinated by Indian commandos in the garb of fighting terrorists during the November 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks. There have been voices in India demanding proper investigation to unearth the culprits behind Malegaon blasts and the linkage between the army officers and Hindu extremist organizations. Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) in India had claimed that a serving Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, who was arrested in connection with the Malegaon blast, was also involved in 2007 Samjhota blasts. ATS said to the Nashik Court that the accused had used RDX to carry out the blast.

Putting an end to all speculations, the anti-terror branch of Mumbai Police had said that Army RDX was used and not supplied from across the border, which vindicated Pakistan’s position. There is now substantial evidence that Purohit procured 60 kg of RDX from Jammu and Kashmir in the year 2006, a part of which is suspected to have been used in Samjhota Express train explosion and Malegaon blasts, Maharashtra police told the court that Purohit gave a part of the RDX to one Bhagwan who is suspected to have used it in Samjhota Express blast. The RDX was also suspected to have been used in Malegaon bomb explosion, therefore Purohit’s interrogation was necessary, public prosecutor had told the court. Earlier, the Lt Colonel had told the court that he was not ill-treated by ATS personnel as claimed by his family. In addition to Colonel Prasad Purohit (a serving officer) two other army officers were arrested in connection with September 29 Malegaon bomb blasts, five days after Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and two others were held in the case. The two arrested were identified as Major ® Ramesh Upadhyay from Pune and Sameer Kulkarni from Indore in Madhya Pradesh.

It has become a norm that on every bomb blast or an act of terrorism in India, the fingers of accusation are pointed towards Pakistan and its linkage with Muslim organizations in India. Hundreds of innocent young boys are picked up and kept under illegal detentions. In addition to torture, arrests, harassment of their families, the families and victims are pressured into signing blank papers. In 2007, Indian agencies had accused Harkat-ul-Jehad-i-Islami activist alias Bilal of being involved in Samjhota blasts when two coaches were completely gutted. India often names Muslim organizations, which in fact do not exist. Anyhow, on the demand of Human Rights Watch and other non-governmental organizations the Indian government acknowledged that Hindu extremist organizations were behind the terrorists’ activities. On 24th August 2008 two Bajrang Dal workers died while making bombs. In this age of information technology and media explosion, India could not hide the link between the army and the Hindu extremist organizations. And this policy will surely be disaster for India.

Already, India is facing insurgencies in northern states. India is trying to crush insurgency by Maoist Naxals by using military and para-military forces. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal - homeland to millions of India’s tribal people. It is easier on the liberal conscience to believe that the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty, and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State. In Time weekly, Jyoti Thottam wrote: “The Maoist Naxal rebellion is not just a violent and enduring insurgency. It also reflects India’s failure to lift up its neediest people”.

The author quoted Rammohan, the retired Indian Police Service commander who believed that the only solution to the Maoists threat was political. But the Naxals, he says, will be harder to co-opt than militants elsewhere. Other insurgencies are defined by their demands, and once you fulfill them they are neutralized. The Naxals appear to have no specific agenda other than enforcing existing laws on land reform, and the right to food, health and education for the poor. But Indian policies are not geared towards providing basic needs of the population but spending billions of dollars on its defence to become a world power.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

SWEET IS SLEEP TO ME AND EVEN MORE TO BE OF STONE,WHILE THE WRONG AND SHAME ENDURE.TO BE WITHOUT SIGHT OR SENSE IS A MOST HAPPY CHANGE FOR ME,THEREFORE DO NOT ROUSE ME. HUSH! SPEAK LOW. I said to God "I hate Life" God replied "Who asked you to love life? Just Love me & life will be beautiful" Living in favorable and unfavorable conditions is PART of living. Smiling in all those conditions is ART of living."Anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure you're worshiping an idol"

[Edit: I apologize for posting this partially misleading article. US Embassy in New Delhi may have not sent these cables but surely all the claims made by this article aren't false. If history teaches us any lesson and from multiple other highly reliable sources, we know that some of the claims are quite true. Only the US Embassy staff in New Delhi may not have made similar claims in their cables.]

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar

Washington, Thursday, December 09, 2010: WikiLeaks revealed that a cable sent from a US Mission in India termed former Indian Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor an incompetent combat leader and rather a geek. His war doctrine, suggesting eliminating China and Pakistan in a simultaneous war front was termed ‘much far from reality’.

Another cable indicates that Gen Kapoor was dubbed as a General who was least bothered about security challenges to the country but was more concerned about making personal assets and strengthening his own cult in the army. The cable also suggested that a tug of war between Kapoor and the current Indian Army Chief had divided the Indian army into two groups.

Yet another cable suggested that the current Army Chief of Indian General VK Singh was having an aggressive approach and believes that ‘offence is the best defence’.

General Singh has also been described as ‘Pakistan, China centric’, with an added aggression towards China. The cable mentioned General Singh as an egotist, self-obsessed, petulant and idiosyncratic General, a braggadocio and a show-off, who has been disliked (and barely tolerated) by all his subordinates.

It is sad to see the media lying to its domestic audience ... there are no such cables.

Red Cross briefed US on ‘torture’ in Kashmir: cablesThe ICRC noted that all the branches of the security forces used torture techniques and always in the presence of an officer http://www.dawn.com/...mir-cables.html

The ICRC noted that all the branches of the security forces used torture techniques and always in the presence of an officer. — Photo by Reuters

NEW DELHI: The International Committee of the Red Cross provided US diplomats in 2005 with evidence of the systematic use of torture by Indian security forces in Kashmir, leaked US diplomatic cables revealed Friday.

In a confidential briefing, the ICRC told the diplomats of 177 visits it had made to detention centres in Indian-administered Kashmir that revealed “stable trend lines” of prisoner abuses, according to the cables released by WikiLeaks.

Techniques included electric shock treatment, sexual and water torture and nearly 300 cases of “roller” abuse in which a round metal object is placed on the thighs of a sitting detainee and then sat on by guards to crush the muscles.

The ICRC said it had been “forced to conclude that the (Indian government) condones torture,” the cables said.

Human rights groups have repeatedly accused India of abuses in Muslim-majority Indian-administered Kashmir, where it has been fighting an armed separatist insurgency for more than 20 years.

The ICRC, which met with nearly 1,500 detainees, stressed that very few were militants. The vast majority were civilians “connected to or believed to have information about the insurgency”.

It also noted that all the branches of the security forces used torture techniques and always in the presence of an officer.

The cables concluded that the evidence of ill-treatment and torture was “very disturbing”.

Militant violence in Indian-administered Kashmir has eased since India and Pakistan launched a peace process in 2004 over the disputed Himalayan region.

But popular pro-independence protests since June have left more than 110 protesters and bystanders — many of them teenagers and young boys — dead.

India and Pakistan each hold part of Kashmir but claim it in full.

Hakim Bey: Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head
Napoleon Bonaparte: The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!

New Delhi, Friday, December 17, 2010: Rahul Gandhi, widely seen as an Indian prime minister-in-waiting, believes Hindu extremists might be a greater threat to his country than other militants, a leaked US diplomatic cable showed on Friday.

Gandhi, scion of India’s Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, told US Ambassador Timothy Roemer last year that there was “some support” among Indian Muslims for militant groups.

“However, Gandhi warned, the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community,” said the cable released by website WikiLeaks.

The opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was quick to respond to the leaked comments, with spokesman Prakash Javdekar accusing Gandhi and his Congress party of bias.

“They don’t know what India is and what the Hindu ethos stands for. To call Hindu groups more dangerous than militants is the product of a sick mind,” Javdekar said.

There was no immediate reaction from Gandhi or the Congress party to the leak.

There is something very wrong with a country that deploys more than 50% of its Armed Forces to control an area roughly 7% of its size and inhabited by less than 1% of its population. No other country in the world utilizes such a large amount of its military resources to hold onto a land whose inhabitants don’t want to be a part of it. Sorwar